CoolSculpting is among the most popular fixes for unwanted bulges. But the risk of a serious side effect appears to be higher than previously known.
More than a dozen years ago, a medical device hit the market with a tantalizing promise: It could freeze away stubborn pockets of fat quickly, painlessly and without surgery. Cryolipolysis Machine
The device, called CoolSculpting, was entering an already-crowded beauty industry selling flatter stomachs and tauter jaw lines, but it had an advantage: a vaunted scientific pedigree. The research behind its development came from a lab at Harvard Medical School’s primary teaching hospital, a detail noted routinely in news features and talk show segments.
The pitch worked. CoolSculpting machines are now common in dermatology and plastic surgery offices and medical spas, and the technology has generated more than $2 billion in revenue.
Cryolipolysis, the technical term for the procedure, involves placing a device onto a targeted part of the body to freeze fat cells. Patients typically undergo multiple treatments on the same area. In successful cases, the cells die and the body absorbs them.
But for some people, the procedure results in severe disfigurement. The fat can grow, harden and lodge in the body, sometimes even taking on the shape of the device’s applicator. This side effect, called paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, usually requires surgery to correct. “It increased, not decreased, my fat cells and left me permanently deformed,” the supermodel Linda Evangelista wrote in 2021 of her experience with CoolSculpting.
Allergan Aesthetics, a unit of the pharmaceutical giant AbbVie that now owns CoolSculpting, says this is rare, occurring in 0.033 percent of treatments, or about 1 in 3,000.
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