What is a Forehead Lipoma?

Forehead lipomas are benign fatty growths that form on the forehead. Forehead lipomas are not life-threatening but are a cause of distress. Forehead lipomas are usually removed when they become too noticeable.
Lipomas on the head are particularly disfiguring and patients often complain of low self-esteem, bullying or making changes to their appearances to prevent the lipoma being observed.

Causes of a Forehead Lipoma

Forehead lipomas are most often caused by trauma to the affected area. Unlike pilar cysts, forehead lipomas are not usually reported to have a genetic basis. See a more extensive material on pilar cysts here.
Patients recall having developed lumps on the scalp as a result of an accident or a direct trauma. Repeated insults to the head, such as heading a football, can also be a cause of developing a fatty lump.

Forehead Lipoma Removal

Forehead lipoma removal is more complex than other cyst excisions.
Unlike cysts, or pilar cysts, lipomas are fatty lumps and present in the form of a fatty pad that lays underneath the skin and sometimes underneath a muscular layer.
Lipoma tissue is more friable than cyst tissue, therefore their removal is trickier and it requires a skilled practitioner to perform this surgery.
Forehead lipomas are usually removed during a minor surgery procedure, under local anaesthetic. The removal steps are similar to cyst removal and they involve numbing of the affected area, a small incision of the skin, lipoma excision and suturing of the incision.

Forehead lipoma surgery poses its risks.

The main risk of surgery is bleeding during and/or after the procedure. The human head is webbed in small, medium and large blood vessels and sometimes, depending on their location, lipomas are deemed to be unsafe for removal under local anaesthetic. Very rarely the lipoma may lay very close to the location of a nerve, if this is the case then the procedure is unlikely to be performed at the clinic.

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