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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Babak Azizzadeh, a facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon who serves as founder and director of Beverly Hills’s Center for Advanced Facial Plastic Surgery.
Azizzadeh, who is also the co-founder and president of clinical research platform Macro Trials, discussed how new injectable GLP-1 drugs used for weight loss like Ozempic are affecting plastic surgery trends.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What are you using and hearing and seeing about the use of GLP-1s for weight loss, and what could the trend mean for the future of healthcare?
We don’t know all the information yet. Over the next couple of years, I think we’re going to know a lot more whether this is just a trend that’s going to stay, or healthcare providers—as well as consumers and patients—are going to continue demanding and desiring to utilize this for weight loss purposes in addition to patients who have diabetes. The jury’s out.
But it’s really exciting because obesity is such a huge epidemic in the US and probably across many, many westernized countries. To have a nonsurgical treatment that also helps with a disease—and prevention, potentially—that’s very critical for multiple other issues, like cardiovascular issues. We’ll see how things go over the next two to five years with more and more people being on [those medications]. We’ll see if there are long-term side effects that we don’t know of, some other issues that may come up. But as a whole, given the significance of obesity in our health system, this is amazing and potentially a game changer.
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Do you think the rising use of GLP-1s will displace other interventions, like bariatric surgery?
I definitely think that it’s going to have a significant impact on weight loss surgery, which is, albeit, very safe but it’s still invasive and pretty significantly invasive—even though it’s now laparoscopic. You’re trimming the stomach, you’re reorienting the intestines; they’re pretty significant surgeries. From that perspective, I definitely think the number of patients who undergo bariatric surgery is going to decrease.
What about plastic surgery? How do you think GLP-1s for weight loss could affect demand for those procedures?
Because massive weight loss tends to result in a significant loss of volume in the face—and that has tremendous impact in our aging process: our appearance, the facial laxity, facial aging—I think it’s going to actually lead to an increase in facelifts, fat grafting, fillers, and a variety of other plastic surgical procedures to reduce the stigma of massive weight loss.
“Ozempic face” is trending all over social media, and it’s a true phenomenon. The same thing with the body. When we have significant body weight loss, the same things happen on the body: loose skin, hanging skin, and so forth. Those patients may need surgeries, such as body lifts.
How does the buzz around GLP-1s compare to the excitement we’ve seen before around other trendy procedures like Botox?
Botox is still at the top of the perch of plastic surgery, but I think Ozempic and this class of drugs are going to be real game changers in health and wellness.