A new device to keep your chin up

Face-lifts, liposuction and fat injections can wipe years off the face, but a sagging neck has remained the bane of aging men and women.

Now two facial plastic surgeons have shown that permanently placing a thin Gore-Tex strip under the skin of the neck and jaw and attaching it behind both earlobes can reduce neck sagginess when performed with other neck-rejuvenating procedures. The experimental sling can be tightened later as time takes an additional toll.

“This is not for everybody. It’s a procedure that’s done in addition to standard techniques that are tried-and-true, such as a face-lift or neck lift,” said Dr. Arvind Prabhat, an ear, nose and throat specialist and facial plastic surgeon who participated in a study of the device. The sling works best, he said, for patients with a poorly defined neck and jaw line, those unhappy with previous neck surgery or those whose previous facial surgery left them with sagging glands beneath the jaw line.

Even though Gore-Tex (polytetrafluoroethylene) has been used in medical procedures for 30 years, Prabhat said patients and doctors should be cautious about using the sling, except when they can’t get a good result without it. There’s always a small chance of infection when you implant a material into the body, he added.

The study involved 100 patients (88 women and 12 men) who got the experimental sling while undergoing other neck-rejuvenating procedures between October 1996 and December 1998. The report, in which more than 90% of the patients said the procedure met or exceeded their expectations, appears in the November/December issue of the Archives of Plastic Surgery. The doctors didn’t publish their results until they’d followed the patients an average of three years to see if there were any long-term side effects, Prabhat said.

“It’s a procedure that in the right patients can give good results,” said Dr. Foad Nahai, a plastic surgeon in Atlanta who was not involved in the study.