Tag Archives: suicide

Can Having Breast Implants Lead to Suicide? 7 On Your Side Investigates

We Are Quoted, ,
Kimberly Suiters, WJLA ABC7: November 7, 2016.

Three-hundred thousand women will get breast implants this year, making it the number one cosmetic surgery in the U.S. Research shows the typical breast implant patient has high self-esteem and good mental health, higher and better than the general population. According to implant manufacturers, satisfaction rates top the 83-97 percentile range, excellent results for any kind of surgery. So why would some women with breast implants have a higher rate of suicide than women who don’t have them?

“Maybe just a coincidence,” Dr. Scott Spear, a well-known plastic surgeon in Washington, D.C., told 7 On Your Side. “There may be an association between breast implants and suicide, but it’s probably a loose association.”

That’s not the way Diana Zuckerman, PhD, president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, sees it. Not at all.

“When you look at suicide and implants, the women with breast implants are more likely to kill themselves.”

How much more likely? Anywhere from two to 12 times. Zuckerman wrote about that conclusion after evaluating seven studies on the topic.

“Some surgeons believe if a woman with implants kills herself, she must’ve had something wrong to begin with; that she got implants because of low self-esteem, depression, to feel better. But women with implants are more likely to kill themselves than with other (plastic) surgeries. Why would a mastectomy patient be 10 times as likely to kill herself as a mastectomy patient who doesn’t have implants?”

Zuckerman doesn’t know that answer definitively, but she is convinced there is something physiological or mental that causes women with implants to have a diminished view of themselves.

The number of women who get to that tragic point is small. According to the CDC: 9.8 women per 100,000 will commit suicide. And middle-aged women, in general, had the largest increase in suicide in the last 15 years, up 63 percent.

Dr. Zuckerman said women going through menopause are one of the highest risk groups. Their bodies have changed after giving birth, and they may be lured in by “Mommy Makeover” marketing.

“But according to research,” she said, “it’s a bad time. A dangerous time.”

[…]

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All But Forgotten

We Are Quoted, ,
Tinker Ready, Special to The Los Angeles Times: October 1, 2001.

In the made-for-TV movie about two women who took on Dow Corning Corp. and other medical device makers over the safety of silicone breast implants, the women emerge as winners. In real life, P.J. Brent’s story did not have such a happy ending.

Like the movie heroines, the Atlanta mother of six believed she had been poisoned by leaking implants. […] But a Pennsylvania pediatrician contradicted her, telling the FDA that there is no scientific evidence linking Brent’s implants to her children’s severe leg numbness, rashes and difficulty swallowing.

Brent’s story ended a few months after the FDA hearing. One summer morning, she drove to the top of a five-story parking garage at a shopping mall in suburban Atlanta, climbed over the railing and leaped to her death.

For years, women like Brent who blame breast implants for chronic illnesses had lawyers, activists, journalists and a small but determined group of doctors and scientists to back them up. […]

Then, in the mid-1990s, their cases began to unravel. New research failed to find a connection between their symptoms and their implants. Even as breast implant manufacturers agreed to a record-breaking class-action settlement, prestigious medical journals were publishing studies concluding that women with implants were no more likely to be sick than the rest of us. […]

P.J. Brent’s suicide was not the first among women who believe they are ill from implants, Melvin noted. Women with silicone breast implants are four times more likely to commit suicide than other plastic surgery patients, according to a study by the National Cancer Institute. […]

Stuart Bondurant, the dean emeritus of the University of North Carolina medical school, headed the congressional panel, which was based at the prestigious Institute of Medicine. […] Bondurant’s group issued its report in 1999, concluding that the evidence linking silicone implants to serious illness is “insufficient or flawed.”  […]

The Institute of Medicine report was not intended to be the last word, but many doctors, judges and journalists have interpreted it that way, said Diana Zuckerman, the director of the National Center for Policy Research for Women & Families, a Washington, D.C.-based think-tank. As a result, the two reports had “an enormous chilling effect” on both the legal case against implants and the potential for further research, she said.

“It’s a travesty,” said Zuckerman, an epidemiologist and former Capitol Hill aide who organized the first congressional hearing on implant safety. “The women are desperately trying to get someone to help them. They are told it is in their head, and they are treated as if they are just out to get money.”

Zuckerman and others have put their faith in several government studies. One FDA study suggests that women with silicone in their bloodstream may be more vulnerable to health problems, she said. And the first of several NIH studies found that women with implants are more likely than other plastic surgery patients to take their own lives or die from brain tumors and lung cancer. […]

“They feel very invalidated,” she said. “They feel that no one is listening to them.” So they get depressed, only to be told that depression is causing their physical problems, she said. […]

So they turn to each other, mostly through Internet support groups, where they trade stories, find doctors willing to remove implants and vent their anger. Often, it is not enough. “Realistically, what these groups do is provide information and shoulders to cry on, and that’s all they can do,” Zuckerman said. […]

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