B Venkata Ratnam
NMCS Hospital, UAE
Title: A new classification and treatment protocol for gynecomastia
Biography
Biography: B Venkata Ratnam
Abstract
Patients with gynecomastia seek flat chests, no scars on chest wall and no evidence of the condition after surgery. Despite the availability of a large amount of literature on the subject, gynecomastia continues to be a neglected subject. And, a concerted effort on the part of medical fraternity to standardize treatment guidelines for this condition is lacking. The result is that some of the patients who underwent surgery for gynecomastia are not fully satisfied with the outcomes of surgery. The causes for such dissatisfaction, as observed by the author, are:
1) Residual gynecomastia,
2) Redundant skin sleeves,
3) Persistent infra-mammary folds &
4) Unsightly scars on chest wall.
After carefully analyzing the outcomes over a period of seven years, the author had found that the presence of infra-mammary folds and the skin redundancies are the main causes of such unsatisfactory results. Based on these two simple clinical features, the author has categorized gynecomastia into three types and identified treatment techniques to treat each category. Application of this new classification and treatment protocol over a period of eight years was found to eliminate those unsatisfactory outcomes and to yield uniformly satisfactory results. Details of the classification, the treatment protocol and the results are included in the presentation.