Colette Bouchez, HealthDay: August 21 2002.
As federal health officials ready for hearings on whether silicone breast implants should be allowed back on the U.S. market, a 2002 study offers evidence of a reduced rate of implant rupture. The study, conducted by a group of Danish researchers, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study implant rupture rates in some 300 women for a period of three years. From that data, the researchers extrapolated a rupture rate of 15 percent to 17 percent 10 years after the women received the implants. […]
Diana Zuckerman, a former member of the National Cancer Institute advisory committee on breast implants, says the study offers a gross underestimate of the implant rupture problem.
“If it were truly 15 percent at 10 years, that would be an improvement, but I do not believe for a minute that it is 15 percent. It’s an estimate based on an assumption that I don’t believe this study supports,” says Zuckerman, executive director of the National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families.
Zuckerman notes the research, published in an issue of the Archives of Surgery, only studied women for three years. And without specific 10-year data, there’s no real way to accurately project the rate of rupture across an entire decade, she says.
A study published in 2000 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found a silicone implant rupture rate as high as 55 percent, with up to 69 percent of all women likely to experience a rupture in at least one breast. […]
“Up until two years ago there were no specific studies done on the health problems of women whose implants ruptured. And when this research was finally conducted, in one study by the FDA and two by the NCI (National Cancer Institute), there was a significant increase in certain health problems in the women with the ruptured implants,” Zuckerman says.
Zuckerman says the findings from the NCI studies were even more troubling. In this research, doctors compared women who had breast implants to other plastic surgery patients, and found the implant group (most of whom had silicone gel implants) were more than twice as likely to die from brain cancer, and three times as likely to die of lung cancer.
“If I were a woman contemplating silicone breast implants, this would sure scare me,” Zuckerman says. […]
Read the original article here.