Background: The use of dermal fillers for enhancing lips and reducing wrinkles is currently one of the fastest growing sectors of the cosmetic surgery market. There are numerous fillers available, some are synthetic others are isolated from biological material. Once injected the fillers have a varied lifespan ranging from months to years depending upon the material, site of injection and individual response. Current assessment techniques of filler performance are mostly limited to evaluations of the skin surface topography, and not to what is happening to the filler beneath the skin surface. The aim of this work was to see if high-frequency ultrasound could be used to image and measure filler dimensions in situ. Method: This was a pilot study of six healthy female volunteers aged 36-53 visiting the surgical outpatients department of a hospital in Glasgow. Volunteers had been injected with filler material into their upper lip 6 months before the visit. The patients all had their upper lip scanned using highfrequency ultrasound. The subsequent images were then assessed using the scanner software to assess the dimensions of the filler.

Anaesthesia for patients with mitochondrial disorders occurs with regularity, either for a diagnostic or therapeutic procedure associated with the syndrome or for unassociated surgery. We report the case of a 17-year-old boy with mitochondrial encephalomyopathy-lactic acidosis-stroke-like episodes (MELAS) syndrome who underwent a laparotomy for fundoplication. The potential hazards of anaesthesia for this patient, and the steps taken to avoid them, are discussed.

High-frequency diagnostic ultrasound proved to be a useful clinical tool and showed that HRT appears to help maintain skin thickness in menopause.

Summary SHOT has been auditing information on transfusion practice for over ten years. Looking at this data allows us to determine the differences in the incidence of hazards seen in children compared to adults and to see which hazards are of particular importance for children of different ages undergoing surgery.

The data used to compare the groups indicates that if the abdominal skin of the patient does not get thinner as the pregnancy progresses there is an indication that the patient may be hypertensive. The fractal data comparing the groups indicates the following when comparing a patient's fractal signature with the non-pregnant control data: If the abdominal fractal for a pregnant woman is similar to the control group, there is an indication that the patient is hypertensive. It is difficult to predict hypertension in patients, and it is possible that a patient could develop severe preeclampsia between visits to the antenatal clinics. Therefore, if the high-frequency ultrasound scanner can pick up potential hypertensives early in pregnancy, these women could be identified as potentially high risk.