A 2025 review titled "Threads in Aesthetic Medicine," authored by Sarbaziha and published in Dermatological Reviews on Wiley Online Library, has added a current synthesis of absorbable suspension threads to the aesthetic literature.

The review appears in Dermatological Reviews, a Wiley journal, under the authorship Sarbaziha, dated 2025. That publishing anchor matters: thread-based procedures have expanded rapidly in aesthetic practice over the past decade, and peer-reviewed consolidations of the evidence base remain relatively sparse compared with the volume of manufacturer-driven technique material circulating at conferences and in industry settings.

What the review covers

Threads in aesthetic medicine refer to barbed or smooth suture-based implants — typically made of polydioxanone (PDO), polylactic acid (PLA), or polycaprolactone (PCL) — inserted subdermally to produce mechanical lifting and, secondarily, collagenesis. Reviews of this kind generally organize the field around several axes:

• Material class — absorbable versus non-absorbable, and the degradation timelines of PDO, PLA and PCL formulations
• Thread geometry — barbed (cog) designs for mechanical anchoring versus smooth threads intended for volume and texture effects
• Anatomic application — midface, jawline, neck and brow, each with distinct insertion vectors and complication profiles
• Evidence quality — much of the thread literature rests on small case series and retrospective cohorts rather than randomized controlled trials

Because the review itself sits behind the Wiley paywall, specific effect sizes, patient counts and complication rates from the full text are not available in the public abstract feed. What does this change for practicing dermatologists and aesthetic clinicians? A 2025 peer-reviewed review in an indexed dermatology journal gives injectors and proceduralists a citable, current reference point — useful for consent discussions, training curricula and institutional protocol reviews — in a category where claims often outpace published data.

Why a review, and why now

Thread lifting occupies an awkward position in aesthetic medicine: demand is substantial, the devices are regulated and widely marketed, but head-to-head comparisons against surgical facelift or energy-based tightening are limited. Reviews such as this one serve a filtering function — pulling together scattered series into a single appraisal of what the technique can realistically deliver and where the risks concentrate.

Known complication categories in the thread literature include:

• Suture visibility and palpability, particularly in patients with thin soft-tissue coverage
• Dimpling or banding from excessive tension at anchor points
• Infection and extrusion, typically managed with thread removal
• Nerve injury, with rare but documented cases involving the temporal branch of the facial nerve

Whether and how Sarbaziha's review quantifies these events — incidence figures, material-specific rates, or time-to-resolution data — would require the full text; readers with institutional Wiley access can retrieve it directly from Dermatological Reviews.

The practical takeaway

For clinicians, the appearance of this review in a dermatology-title journal signals that thread-based lifting is being treated as part of the dermatologic procedural canon rather than a fringe cosmetic offering. Clinics weighing whether to add threads to their service mix, or revising existing protocols, will want the full text in hand before drawing conclusions on technique selection or patient counseling.

How the field absorbs it — guideline citations, residency teaching, or quiet confirmation of existing practice — will play out over the next review cycle.