8-Years of Consecutive Rhytidectomies: A Single Surgeon’s Experience

Goals/Purpose: Over the past several decades, there have been several advances to how we approach face lift procedures. By leveraging the expertise of the senior author, we reviewed and analyzed the experience of over 200 consecutive face lifts. The overall goal of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of complications after rhytidectomy and to identify risk factors associated with them.

Methods/Technique: We performed a retrospective review of the senior author’s patients undergoing rhytidectomy between 2010 and 2018. We investigated descriptive statistics and identified factors that could contribute to increased risk of complication after facelift. Risk factors were analyzed by Chi-square (categorical variables) or independent T-tests (categorical and continuous) with significance set at p < 0.05. All statistical analysis was conducted using the IBM® SPSS® Statistics 28.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y).

Results/Complications: In total, we identified 267 patients who underwent rhytidectomy between 2010 and 2018. Of these, 238 (89.1%) were women and average age was 63.0 ± 6.6 years old. The average BMI was 23.9 ± 3.6. One hundred forty-four (53.9%) patients underwent primary, one hundred and nine (40.8%) underwent secondary, fourteen (5.2%) underwent tertiary rhytidectomies. The most common manipulation of the SMAS included plication only (112, 41.9%), resection (35, 13.1%), mobilization, resection, and plication (25, 9.4%). Overall, 5 patients (1.9%) experienced major complications, including hematoma (3, 1.1%), infection (1, 0.4%) and parotid fistula (1, 0.4%). Of note, there were no cases of DVT or VTE. Moreover, there were no significant differences in complications when comparing type of facelift (primary, secondary, tertiary) (p=0.432), age at operation (p=0.452), BMI (p=0.302), or SMAS manipulation (p=0.318).

Conclusion: In the senior author’s experience, complications are relatively uncommon following a facelift procedure. No significant differences were observed in complication rates by BMI, age, primary versus secondary or tertiary surgery, or SMAS manipulation.