Textbook of Absorbable Thread Lifting

Beginning with the Aptos lift in the late 1980s, thread lifting has seen continual advances and improvement during the last 40 years. Nevertheless, for much of its long history, thread lifting was not a widely known procedure among physicians or the general public. This changed 10 years ago with the development of absorbable thread lifting techniques using polydioxanone (PDO), which precipitated the popularization of a new concept of lifting to achieve not only elevation but also tissue stimulation and regeneration and began a new chapter in the history of thread lifting.

We have accumulated much experience with both absorbable and nonabsorbable thread lift-ing and learned a lot about their differences and respective strengths and weaknesses. However, there have still not been many studies or research papers on the theoretical background and practical techniques for absorbable thread lifting. While foreign physicians have shown great interest in absorbable thread lifting during overseas presentations and meetings in Korea, we have also felt that these physicians often gain doubts about the nature of the procedure, since they have not seen related textbooks.

We wrote this book to be a cornerstone of absorbable thread lifting, which has the poten-tial to develop as an area of academic interest both in Korea and worldwide. Although writing this book took more time and effort than expected, in retrospect, there is still much room for improvement. We have also experienced a great amount of change and improvement in these 2 years, but we consider this a beginning and plan to further supplement and enhance this content in the future.

This book aims to describe a general, objective technique that can be used by anyone to produce similar results, rather than the individual experiences and techniques of the authors. Depending on the surgeon’s skill, it is also possible to use only monofilament thread, and in the future, as we gain more experience, we will include an explanation of a method that also uses cog thread at a level that is suited to novices and experts alike. Above all, we aimed to discuss various real clinical cases, in order to help readers familiarize the technique in practice.

We want to express our gratitude to  Ju-Yeon Jang, Sec-tion Manager Ho-Hyun Lee, and Assistant Manager Eun-Hee Jo who provided material and moral assistance for the publication of this book. We would also like to thank all the esteemed teachers and colleagues who have helped us to work diligently at our respective hospitals. We hope that this book will contribute in some way to the academic advancement of absorbable thread lifting.