Summary
Between January 1996 and December 2002, 189 women underwent bilateral superior-pedicle
breast reduction according to the Lejour technique, at Brugmann University Hospital
(Brussels, Belgium). We conducted a retrospective study on the 18 women who gave birth
since the operation. Our aim was to find out how many of them breastfed, the reasons
for not breastfeeding from those who did not, and to look for parameters that might
have interfered with breastfeeding success. The latter was defined as the ability
to breastfeed for a minimum of 2 weeks, with or without nutritional supplementation.
Eight patients out of 18 successfully breastfed for an average duration of 1.9±1.3 months, and ceased to do so in most cases for reasons other than spontaneous cessation
of lactation. Another eight women made no attempt at breastfeeding for various reasons.
According to data obtained from a report of the Belgian French-speaking Community,
our series of patients made proportionally fewer breastfeeding attempts than women
from a culturally similar context (74%). However, they exclusively breastfed for a
median duration of 3 months, superior to the 8–9 weeks of the women included in the
government report. Two patients failed at their breastfeeding attempts. We were able
to demonstrate the role of neither anthropomorphic, operation-related, neuro-sensitive
nor psychological factors in those failures. Our results, when confronted to those
of similar studies, show that the Lejour technique allows breastfeeding in proportions
similar to those of any other pedicled technique.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: September 05, 2006
Accepted:
May 31,
2006
Received:
February 7,
2006
Identification
Copyright
© 2006 British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
