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Dangerous breast implants cause widespread shock - but could we have seen it coming?

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London, December 22 2011

A scandal has erupted in France surrounding the use of implants for breast enhancement and reconstructive surgery that were made from industrial rather than medically approved silicon.

The implants were made by the French company Poly Implant Prosthese (PIP) and had already been implanted into around 30,000 French women. They have been found to be subject to more risk of leakage and are more prone to bursting than other implants. This week, when this story broke, they were also linked by French researchers to eight cases of cancer.

Senior French officials have told the Libération newspaper that the state would order the removal of the implants from all the women who have them.

On 22nd December 2011 the UK Guardian reported that in Britain even more women have had the PIP implants than in France, with an estimated 40,000 in receipt of the implants via both private clinics and possibly the NHS. At least 250 women with implants made by the company plan to sue the clinics which implanted them and promised that they would be safe and last a lifetime.

The UK Department of Health, as reported in the Guardian, said that there was no evidence to support the routine extraction of the implants. The prospect of paying for 40,000 removal operations might well seem a daunting prospect, at a time when the British government is making swinging cuts to NHS budgets. RHM expects this position to change over the coming weeks.

Reproductive Health Matters raised concerns about the safety of silicon breast implants in May 2010, with the publication of an entire journal issue on Cosmetic surgery, body image and sexuality. The journal included a paper summarising existing research on the health impacts of breast implants by Diana M Zuckerman, President of the National Research Centre for Women & Families, Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund, based in Washington DC.

She reported that problems experienced by women with supposedly safe breast implants include risk of rupture and leaking, risks related to removal, negative impacts on breast feeding, risk of reduced accuracy of mammograms, need for subsequent surgeries and replacement implants, inadequate information provision and the prohibitive cost of associated procedures and scans.

This paper is available free online via our publisher Elsevier.