The weighing scale and skinfold measurements show that your body composition is fine, but still there are a couple of fat deposits you'd just love to get rid of. A couple of years ago you'd have had two options: plastic surgery or gels with stimulants. Now there's a third option: laser treatment. According to researchers at Louisiana State University it works too.
Doctors and therapists don't know how they work, but that low level lasers (LLL) are effective is not disputed. Experimental and clinical evidence has been amassed over the past twenty years which shows that laser treatment helps wounds and injuries to heal more quickly and to reduce pain. Cosmetic surgeons and therapists have also recently started to use low level lasers to promote localised fat loss.
In 2002 South American researchers published the results of a study in which they had exposed fat cells in a test tube to laser radiation with a wavelength of 635-680 nanometres for several minutes. [Plast Reconstr Surg. 2002 Sep 1; 110(3): 912-22.] Within four minutes the cells had released 80 percent of their stored fat, and within six minutes they had released 99 percent. The laser light had burned minute holes in the fat cells, the South Americans discovered, and the fat had leaked out.
In 2011 researchers at Louisiana State University published the results of an experiment they performed on 40 test subjects aged between 18 and 65. The subjects were all healthy, had a BMI above 30 and stable bodyweight.
The researchers treated half of the test subjects using the Meridian LAPEX 2000 LipoLaser System, manufactured by Meridian Medical Technologies, [meridianmedical.ca] the research sponsor. The subjects were given eight half-hour treatments over the course of four weeks, during which the researchers directed the laser at the fat layers around the abdomen.
The treatment worked. The photos below give an idea of the effect.
After eight sessions the subjects had lost an average of 2.15 cm from their waist measurement, as the figure above shows.
The researchers feared that the laser treatment killed fat cells. While a shortage of fat cells is not likely to be a problem, it may well be that other more important cells are destroyed too.
The researchers exposed treated and untreated fat cells to propidium iodide [PI] in test tubes. PI is a dye that attaches itself to vital molecules. If cells don’t absorb propidium iodide they are dead. The figure on the right below shows that there was the same number of dead cells in the fat cells that had been exposed to laser radiation as in the untreated fat cells.
In another experiment the researchers exposed treated and untreated fat cells to the dye calcein. The more calcein accumulates in a cell the better the cell membrane can retain the cell's contents. Because the treated cells accumulated less calcein than the untreated cells, the researchers suspect that the laser burned holes in the cell membrane, as the South Americans had discovered in 2002. These holes probably close up again fast.
"The amount of fat mobilized with a single lipolaser treatment, based on the average circumference changes, is a mean of about 52 grams", the researchers write. "If weight is stable, the mobilized fat from the lipolaser treatment will either be burned for food in the body or be distributed into fat depots typical of that person's fat distribution."
Source: Obes Surg. 2011 Jun;21(6):722-9.
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