According to the authors, adverse effects like bruising, redness, swelling, bumpiness, or skin discoloration are typically minimal and fade away on their own. Less than 1% of patients experienced such modest adverse effects.

There has long been a belief that smaller, less intrusive cosmetic surgery are safer than larger, more invasive ones. There wasn't much data to support this theory, though.

Murad Alam, M.D., a dermatology professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, led the new study, which was released in JAMA Dermatology on November 5.

The message to patients is that if they are considering one of these operations, they are not taking a risky or dramatic step, according to Alam. The lesson here is that these operations are quite safe and can be combined to provide the person with a considerable cosmetic benefit, as opposed to having one major cosmetic procedure that might be dangerous.

The Northwestern study examined the outcomes of 20,399 procedures completed prospectively over three months by 23 board-certified dermatologists at eight centres (private and institutional dermatology out-patient clinics) across the nation, staggered over nine months to account for seasonal variation.

Every day, doctors were requested to input data into a large computer database. They listed the number of procedures they carried out each day, the kind of procedure, whether any complications occurred, and what kind of complications occurred.

The data was then split up by procedure type to determine the distinct complication rates for each kind of filler, laser or energy device, and neurotoxic.

The rates for fillers were.52 percent, which was slightly higher than the rates for energy devices and neurotoxins despite the fact that all adverse rates were minimal. However, the authors noted that this is predictable given that fillers are somewhat more intrusive than lasers and neurotoxins in the field of minimally invasive and non-invasive procedures.