I was surfing the web today June 22, 2011, and saw Yahoo news had the catchy headline “women can’t keep breast implants for life: FDA.” This is in the “most popular news” section of the news, and has been shared on facebook over 2400 times and retweeted.
This is not news.
No patient leaves my office without knowing someday they will have to replace their implants. Implants can get infected, turn hard, deflate, migrate. They are foreign objects. They wear down or get wrinkles and someday will have an issue. So why do so many women do them? They tend to be durable: the warranty lasts for 10 years, and one of my classmates in residency ran over one with his car and it survived. But someday you will need to replace it.
So what did the FDA say today? And why now? They just got preliminary results on a study required of Allergan and Mentor.
“Based on the totality of the evidence, the FDA believes that silicone gel-filled breast implants have reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness when used as labeled,” the agency said.
The FDA said that women considering getting implants should know that one in five recipients has them removed within 10 years.
“Breast implants are not lifetime devices. The longer a woman has silicone gel-filled breast implants, the more likely she is to experience complications,” the FDA said.
I do think there are issues with implants, and am leaning more and more toward fat grafting to the breast, but with regards to breast implants, instead of focusing on the 1 in 5 who may require reoperation within 10 years (and I bet that number is much higher for the breast cancer patients than cosmetic breast augmentation patients), you could focus on the 80% who have not.
For all of their issues, silicone implants do make a lot of women happy, and for really thin women with no fat, breast implants still give a good option for breast enhancement.