A new technique for reconstructive surgery is helping patients look and feel more like their former selves.
While operations for facial cancer can be life-saving, they can also create new problems. That is because doctors have to transplant skin and tissue from other parts of the body such as the leg, which have not had the same level of sun exposure as the patient's face.
"It ends up being like taking a piece of baby fresh white skin or pale skin, depending on the person's natural pigment, and that goes to the face," Dr. Daniel Knott, director of the UCSF Division of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, told KCBS Radio's "As Prescribed." "And it like is a little sign saying that they are disfigured, because the color mismatch is just so telling."
Knott said having obvious patches of mismatched skin can take a toll on people's mental health.
Now, he has found a way to fix it.
"It was never thought of as thing that you could change," he said. "So, that's what I think is so exciting about this is that it is the first effort in actually recognizing, 'Hey, we can actually change these colors.'"
He does it by removing some of the layers from the transplanted section of tissue, and grafting a thin, semi-transparent layer of skin to the face in order to let some of the natural colors underneath show through.
"We can put the very very top layer of skin right back down and it acts almost like privacy glass," he explained.
This results in a much better color match, which can be tailored to each patient. Knott is already doing corrective surgery for people who had it done the old way.
"There's no reason that other surgeons can't already use this technique," he said. "It's not terribly difficult. It's just new."
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