Why I don’t put steroids in fat-reducing injections

I’m often asked whether LINE ON Injection, our injection treatment for small areas of fat, contains steroids. It doesn’t.

Because steroids make tissue shrink, they can seem effective if you look only at the visible change. But they can cause side effects throughout the body, including irregular periods and bleeding between periods. I don’t think that’s a risk worth taking to boost the result of a single injection.

Instead, I keep the formulation within conservative limits and build results by injecting at different depths within the fat layer and over several sessions. I choose the drugs by the same standard I apply to everything else: finding ways to increase the effect while reducing side effects.

Here is what the research shows. Reports from many fields show that steroid injections affect the whole body. In a 2015 analysis of 74 studies, adrenal function decreased in 52.2% of cases after steroid injections into a joint, and the researchers wrote that no route of administration or dose could reliably avoid reduced adrenal function. In a 2013 US study analyzing 8,166 epidural steroid injections in the lower back, people were 2.8 times more likely to seek care for abnormal vaginal bleeding after the injection than before it.

The tissue-shrinking effect can also become a side effect in the skin. In a study of 24 people whose skin became depressed and lost color after triamcinolone injections, the 10 who had a biopsy showed shrunken lobules of fat under the skin. These studies concern steroid injections used in joints, the spine and skin lesions; none looked specifically at steroids mixed into fat-reducing injections. Even so, since the same drug enters the body in the same way, I choose to leave it out.