[Scoundreller]

My point is that you end up with fewer fat cells, but unsure whether this has any impact on weight regain.

(Which is worth assessing if there are concerns about these drugs increasing the number of fat cells (otherwise unusual in adulthood) and creating a risk of fat volume rebound beyond initial levels after discontinuation).

[kuhewa]

Weight is back to baseline within a few months after lipectomy and sometimes greater than baseline. In animal models there is regeneration of fat cell number following lipectomy along with increase in cell size, and which mechanism predominates depends on how large the fat cells were before (manipulated by reducing food). This is the critical fat cell size hypothesis, and in humans there is similarly evidence that fat cell number increases (hyperplasia) in advanced stages of obesity after the cells reach critical size (hypertrophy) but I'm not aware of that being studied in situ in lipectomy recovery. I'd make a confident guess that it depends on how obese the patient is and perhaps their baseline number of fat cells.

But there are a lot of different mechanisms and feedbacks at play and I'm not sure how much insight can be gained from comparing localised lipectomy to systemic adipocyte proliferation resulting from a drug.

[nsxwolf]

This sounds especially bad cosmetically, because the fat will show up in some place it didn't used to. I would imagine it could make you look even worse.