Dr. Pearlman on the safety of hyaluronic acid fillers for penile augmentation

In this video, Amy Pearlman, MD, highlights the key takeaways from the abstract, “Safety of novel hyaluronic acid dermal filler injections for penile girth enhancement,” which she presented at the 24th Annual Fall Scientific Meeting of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America in San Diego, California. Pearlman is the co-founder of Prime Institute in South Florida.

Video Transcript:

When I think about urology and innovation, there aren't too many other topics I can think about within our field that are as polarizing as penile augmentation. Today's session really emphasized the different conversations surrounding this area. A lot of people hear one story, or they hear about one complication, or they just have this thought in their mind about what this procedure entails, so I think that when you hear one story, you just have one view of what's going on. The beauty of this session is we actually had 2 abstracts in a row talking about the use of hyaluronic acid for penile girth enhancement. At the very basic level of offering this procedure is understanding the safety. There are a lot of things that I can offer patients in clinic, but I always ask myself, first, "how can I hurt this person?" Because it's one thing if something is very effective; chemotherapy is very effective for killing cancer, but it also has adverse events. We have to understand the safety of these therapies. What we found is, in a retrospective review of nearly 500 patients over a 3-year span, none of those patients reported erectile dysfunction, none of them reported loss of penile sensation, and none of them required a trip to the operating room for intervention. A lot of this perception of what penile augmentation is, is with the other studies that use let's say, permanent filler, where actually some of those patients do require a trip back to the operating room. But it's a very different intervention. The more research we do in this field, and the more that we talk about this very taboo and stigmatized topic, I'm hopeful that it's going to encourage more and more people to consider it and do research, because there's still a lot more we need to learn.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.