Category: Breast Implants

U.S. News reported this month on a Danish study designed to examine the effect of breast implants for cosmetic suicides on suicide rates.

The researchers studied the records of more than 10,000 women — 2,788 who had cosmetic breast implants; 7,071 who had breast reductions; and 1,736 who had cosmetic surgery other than breast implants.

Of the 2,788 women who had implant surgery, 14 had committed suicide. Of those, half had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems before having implant surgery. In comparison, only a quarter of the women who had breast reduction surgery and committed suicide had a history of being hospitalized for psychiatric problems. According to U.S. News and World Report,

This supports the hypothesis that breast implants don’t drive women to commit suicide but that women who choose to have breast implants may be more likely than the average woman to have underlying psychiatric problems, the authors write.

Unfortunately, U.S. News and World Report doesn’t put that small number of suicides in context. The suicide rate of women in Denmark is only about 11 per 100,000. The suicide rate among the women with breast implants in this study was a whopping 502 per 100,000. So even the rate of suicide among women who had not been previously hospitalized was still an incredibly high 251 per 100,000 — over 22 times the overall level of female suicide in Denmark. It is possible, of course, that the women who had not been previously hospitalized nonetheless had a higher rate of emotional/psychological problems, though it would be impossible to say one way or another with this study’s methodology.

The study also found an overall much higher death rate among women who had breast implant surgery, largely because those women were far more likely to be smokers.

Source:

Breast implants: Are women who have plastic surgery more likely to commit suicide? Helen Fields, U.S. News and World Report, January 12, 2005.

Two recent studies of women with breast implants confirmed what previous studies had found — such women had a higher suicide rate than women without breast implants.

A Dutch looked at the cause of death for 3,521 Swedish women who had breast implant surgery between 1965 and 1993. In that group there were 15 suicides. In a similar group of women who had not had breast implant surgery, however, there were only 5 suicides.

Another study in Finland looked at 2,166 women who had breast implant surgery between 1970 and 2000. It also found about a three-fold increase in suicides compared to the regular population, and 6 of the 10 suicides among those women occurred within five years of the breast implantation surgery.

There are a number of possibilities to explain the increase in suicides.

One possibility is that women with serious psychological disorders related to feelings about their body seek out breast implantation surgery. Researchers in both studies urged that cosmetic surgeons do more to screen patients for psychological problems.

Another possibility is that this is simply demographics — young whites tend to have the highest rate of suicide and also tend to be disproportionately select cosmetic surgery.

Finally, European countries tend to have very high rates of suicide as it is. American Society of Plastic Surgeons president Dr. James Wells told Reuters Heath that there doesn’t appear to be any increase in suicides among breast implant recipients in the United States,

We’ve been looking at the U.S. breast implant patient population for many, many years and there has been no evidence of increased suicide rates.

Sources:

Women with breast implants more likely to commit suicide. Mark Kaufman, October 4, 2003.

Study: Women with breast implants have threefold higher suicide risk. Joann Loviglio, Associated Press, September 12, 2003.

Breast implant suicide risk. The BBC, March 7, 2003.

Cosmetic breast implants may raise suicide risk. Reuters Health, October 3, 2003.

In 1992, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration “temporarily” banned silicone breast implants until further studies cleared up whether they posed health risks. So what do you do if you’re a government agency and your $4 million dollar 8 year study once again demonstrates that implants are safe? You don’t tell anyone.

Salon.Com originally broke this story, and so far few traditional media outlets have bothered to cover the story (although they had no problem whipping up anti-implant hysteria). Shortly after the ban on silicone implants, Dr. Louise Brinton began a major study that followed 14,000 women who had implant surgery purely for cosmetic reasons. Brinton’s study focused specifically on whether or not implants increased the risk of cancer, as some anti-implant activists claimed.

Her study was controversial from the beginning in large part because Brinton herself seemed to hope that her study would demonstrate that silicone implants did indeed raise the risk of cancer. Brinton had extensive contacts with plaintiffs lawyers suing implant manufacturers. She conducted presentations for plaintiffs lawyers, and wrote letters that circulated to women with implants saying things like, “The study provides an opportunity for women who may be suffering as a result of implants to be heard. Now is your chance.”

Unfortunately things didn’t work out like that. Her study was quite definitive on the issue of breast cancer. Not only was there not an increased risk of cancer among implant recipients, but in fact women with breast implants had lower risks of cancer (although this doesn’t mean women should rush out to get implants to lower their cancer risk. This effect is more likely to be due to some confounding factor).

Whew. So implants don’t contributed to breast cancer. Time to spread the good news and let women with implants know those fears are unfounded, right? Not by a long shot.

In fact although the National Cancer Institute prepared a press release, it buried the release on its web site and told NCI press officer Brian Vastag that he was “forbidden” to tell journalists about the press release’s existence. At the beginning of October, Vastag decided he’d had enough with the NCI’s nonsense, forwarded information about the press release and study to journalists anyway, and then resigned from his job. In an e-mail to journalists, Vastag wrote that, “It makes me crazy when tax-funded public health research doesn’t make it to the public.”

The NCI, of course, says the whole episode has a perfectly normal explanation, but there seem to be some holes in that explanation. NCI’s Mass media division told Salon.Com that it was respecting an embargo on the study since it was going to be published in the November issue of Cancer Causes and Control. The problem with that explanation is that a) that journal had already posted a copy of the study to its web site, and b) NCI was only issuing a press release announcing the results of the study rather than distributing copies of the study itself.

NCI’s denial of anything out of the ordinary become even more apparent when Salon.Com asked Newman if NCI would be publicizing the study when it came out in November. Her response? “We’ve already posted the press release, so why would we distribute old news?”

This from an agency that in May 2000 hired a public relations firm to publicize Brinton’s findings that the rupture rate of silicone implants was much higher than previously suspected (the tendency for implants to rupture is one of the few genuine problems with the implants). Letting women know that implants may rupture apparently is at the top of the agenda for NCI, while letting them know that their implants won’t cause cancer is something they should have to find out for themselves by searching the NCI’s web site for a press release buried on the site.

Brinton is also keeping silent. Even though she once touted her study as “the most comprehensive epidemiological study of breast implants to date,” apparently she doesn’t want to publicize the results too much since they didn’t have the outcome she had hoped for.

This is the sort of thing that is inevitable when politics drives scientific research. As the American Council on Science and Health wrote in a recent pamphlet on the breast implant controversy, “In a sense, the anti-silicone-implant crusade is a microcosm for so much that is wrong with how scientific data and principles are distorted and ignored when there is greater gain to be had by doing so. The resoundingly antiscientific — and, until recently — successful crusade against silicone implants portends problems for many other products that may be destroyed by analogous waves of hysteria.”

In this case, not only products but people were harmed, not only by the psychological fears induced by the wave of anti-implant hysteria, but the many women who underwent surgical procedures to have the implants removed on what turned out to be false, unsubstantiated concerns. Women deserve better from the media, government, and research community.

Source:

Covering up the breast. Denise Dowling, Salon.Com, October 9, 2000.

Hush–good news on silicone. John Meroney, The Washington Times, November 22, 2000.

Updated report: Scientific evidence fails to halt silicone breast implant controversy. Press release, American Council on Science and Health, November 27, 2000.