Breastfeeding after vertical reduction mammaplasty using a superior pedicle

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.