a procedureGluteal fat grafting

Fat is taken by liposuction from the abdomen, flanks or back, processed, and injected into the buttocks to add volume and change shape. Some of the graft is reabsorbed over months, which is why surgeons overfill and why a second session is common. The reported danger is specific and mechanical: fat entering a torn gluteal vein travels to the lungs as a pulmonary fat embolism.

In 2017 the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation put a task force on this operation and published what its survey found. Six hundred and ninety-two surgeons responded out of 4,843 members of two international societies contacted, a 14.3 per cent response rate. They reported 32 fatal pulmonary fat emboli across 198,857 career cases, a career rate of 1 in 6,214, and five fatal emboli in 17,519 cases over the previous twelve months, an annual rate of 1 in 3,448. The same paper reported 103 non-fatal pulmonary fat emboli.

The task force's recommendation was about the plane. Deep intramuscular injection was associated with significantly increased risk; injection into the mid and superficial planes was protective, and the authors urged surgeons to avoid deep muscle injections. The paper's own words about the rate were that it is unacceptably high and that the approach to the procedure must be improved.

Inference -- those rates are what surgeons reported about themselves, in a survey answered by one in seven of the members contacted, and they count deaths known to the operating surgeon. A patient who flies home and dies there is not necessarily in the numerator; a clinic that does not belong to either society is not in the denominator. The figure is the best published one, and it is a floor rather than a measurement of the whole trade.

The operation travels heavily all the same, and the price pages are short. Premier Clinic in Prague prices fat transfer to breasts or buttocks with liposuction of one area from 62,800 koruna. RP Clinic in Warsaw prices a BBL from 25,000 zloty and states the figure covers the whole procedure including post-operative care. The American society publishes 7,264 US dollars as an average surgeon's fee, excluding anaesthesia and the operating room. Yanhee in Bangkok, whose plastic surgery table runs to hundreds of lines, prices buttock implants and a buttock lift and does not list fat grafting at all.

General anaesthesia. The harvest is a liposuction, and the volumes are large enough that fluid balance matters. Injection is made with a blunt cannula into the subcutaneous plane above the muscle, under direct control of the tip; the 2017 task force recommendation is against injecting deep to the gluteal muscle. Sitting is restricted for weeks and specialised cushions are sold for the flight home. Graft take is partial and unpredictable, and clinics quote a second session accordingly.

Three published prices sit on this record, from Czechia, Poland and the United States, alongside one published mortality figure from 2017 that the profession itself produced. No national register counts this operation across clinics, so the count of how many are performed each year and where is a gap on this site rather than a number.

This page describes an operation and reports the published figures on its mortality. It is not advice about having one, or about where.