Tag Archives: ALCL

25 Reasons Not to Get Breast Implants

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Dr. Nalini Chilkov, The Huffington Post: Dec 7, 2017

Last week the FDA reported that breast implants put women’s lives in danger. The big news last week was that a small number of women can get a very rare type of cancer (ALCL: anaplastic large cell lymphoma). It confirmed that death is a possible side effect of breast implants. […]

According to Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D., Elizabeth Nagelin-Anderson, M.A.
and Elizabeth Santoro, R.N., M.P.H.: In 2008, more than 300,000 women and teenagers underwent surgery to have their breasts enlarged with silicone or saline implants, and almost 80,000 breast cancer patients had reconstruction after mastectomy, often with implants. The popularity of breast augmentation has more than tripled since 1997, when there were just over 101,000 of these procedures. More than 40,000 implant removal procedures were also reported in 2008. […]

In a study conducted by FDA scientists, most women had at least one broken implant within 11 years, and the likelihood of rupture increases every year. Silicone-7 migrated outside of the breast capsule for 21 percent of the women, even though most women were unaware that this had happened.

Don’t forget the financial burden and increased health insurance costs that go with multiple surgeries and medical complications. In some cases the surgery to remove implants can be like a mastectomy, complete removal of the breast tissue and sometimes the muscle underneath.

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Breast Implants Causing Cancer

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WJMN Local 3 News: September 8, 2017.

Stacey Boone says she was trying to boost her self-esteem, and wound up fighting for her life.

Boone says, “It was, how I wanted to feel about myself.”

She had no idea hew new beast implants would nearly kill her.

Boone says, “I came close three different times to dying. It started metastasizing to my bones and it metastasized to my liver, my liver had shut down.”

Stacey says doctors determined the plastic from her textured implant caused breast implant-associated lymphoma. The symptoms include lumps or hardening of the implant and fluid behind the implant.

Dr. Frederick Locke, medical oncologist, Moffitt Cancer Center says, “The symptoms often come on years after the breast implants are surgically placed.”

Dr. Locke says recent FDA warnings show there have been 359 breast implant-associated lymphoma cases reported. Nine deaths have been documented.

Dr. Locke says, “When the FDA looked at whether it was associated with silicone or saline implants there wasn’t much of a difference.”

But the difference in these cases? 90% had textured implants, just like Boone. Locke says breast implant-associated lymphoma can affect 1-in-30,000 women. […]

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Woman with Rare Cancer Linked to Breast Implants Seeks to Spread Awareness

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CBS News: July 13, 2017.

[…] The American Society of Plastic Surgeons says around 550,000 women last year received breast implants, but the FDA published a report this year linking a rare cancer to the implants.

So far, there have been 359 reported cases globally, including nine deaths.

The risk is low, but one in 30,000 women with implants could develop it, including one patient who says she is battling the disease and her insurance company, reports CBS News correspondent Anna Werner.

Kimra Rogers was shocked to find a tumor under her arm. […]

Then she learned it was cancer, possibly connected to the cosmetic breast implants she’d had put in 17 years ago. […]

It’s called breast implant-associated anaplastic large-cell lymphoma, a rare cancer the FDA says can develop following breast implants, something doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston have been studying for five years.

“This is a type of lymphoma. It is not a breast cancer. It’s actually a cancer that develops in the scar tissue around a breast implant,” said Dr. Mark Clemens. […]

But insurance companies don’t always agree to pay. Rogers says her insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana, denied payment for removal of her implants three times, telling her it was a contract exclusion because her implants were cosmetic. […]

But Dr. Clemens said, “We can’t wait months or years till an insurance company say, ‘okay, we’re gonna cover it.'” […]

But if you notice any changes in the implants or your breasts, such as swelling, head to your doctor’s office as soon as possible to have any problems checked out.

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A Shocking Diagnosis: Breast Implants “Gave Me Cancer”

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Denise Grady, The New York Times: May 14, 2017.

Raylene Hollrah was 33, with a young daughter, when she learned she had breast cancer. She made a difficult decision, one she hoped would save her life: She had her breasts removed, underwent grueling chemotherapy and then had reconstructive surgery.

In 2013, six years after her first diagnosis, cancer struck again — not breast cancer, but a rare malignancy of the immune system — caused by the implants used to rebuild her chest. […]

Her disease — breast implant-associated anaplastic large-cell lymphoma — is a mysterious cancer that has affected a tiny proportion of the more than 10 million women worldwide who have received implants.  […]

The Food and Drug Administration first reported a link between implants and the disease in 2011, and information was added to the products’ labeling […] An F.D.A. update in March that linked nine deaths to the implants has helped raise awareness. The agency had received 359 reports of implant-associated lymphoma from around the world, although the actual tally of cases is unknown because the F.D.A.’s monitoring system relies on voluntary reports from doctors or patients. The number is expected to rise as more doctors and pathologists recognize the connection between the implants and the disease. […]

As late as 2015, only about 30 percent of plastic surgeons were routinely discussing the cancer with patients, according to Dr. Mark W. Clemens II, a plastic surgeon and an expert on the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. […]

Diagnosis and Treatment

Most of the cancers have developed from two to 28 years after implant surgery, with a median of eight. A vast majority occurred with textured implants. […]

Researchers estimate that in Europe and the United States, one in 30,000 women with textured implants will develop the disease. But in Australia the estimate is higher: one in 10,000 to one in 1,000. No one knows why there is such a discrepancy. […]

Symptoms of the lymphoma usually include painful swelling and fluid buildup around the implant. Sometimes there are lumps in the breast or armpit. […]

What exactly causes the disease is not known. One theory is that bacteria may cling to textured implants and form a coating called a biofilm that stirs up the immune system and causes persistent inflammation, which may eventually lead to lymphoma. The idea is medically plausible, because other types of lymphoma stem from certain chronic infections. Professional societies for plastic surgeons recommend special techniques to avoid contamination in the operating room when implants are inserted […]

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FDA Agrees with WHO, Links Breast Implants to Rare Cancer. How Worried Should Women Be?

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Rita Ruben, Forbes: March 22, 2017.

The Food and Drug Administration has received nine reports of women dying of a rare blood cancer years after getting breast implants, according to information the agency released Tuesday.

The FDA says it now agrees with the World Health Organization that such cases are linked to the breast implants and not some unfortunate coincidence. As of Feb. 1, the FDA says, it had received a total of 359 reports of breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL).

The FDA reports suggest that implants with a textured surface are more likely to be associated with the cancer than smooth implants—of the 231 reports that contained information about the implant’s surface, 203 were reported to be textured implants, while 28 were reported to be smooth. The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) analyzed 46 confirmed cases of BIA-ALCL, including three deaths, and none of the cases occurred in women with smooth implants.

BIA-ALCL on average is diagnosed about a decade after implant surgery, according to the WHO. The first reported case of a woman with breast implants developing ALCL was published in a 1997 letter to the journal Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery. While that case was a woman with saline-filled implants, the FDA says the filling, be it saline (salt water) or silicone, doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, although no well-designed studies have yet been conducted to settle that issue.

BIA-ALCL is rare, but just how rare isn’t clear. As the FDA notes, it medical device reports can’t answer that question, because they don’t represent all cases, and the denominator—the total number of women who’ve received breast implants—isn’t known.

ALCL is more common in the breasts of women who’ve had implants than in those who don’t have implants, in whom the cancer almost never develops in the breast. A U.S. studypublished in January concluded that over their lifetime, 3.3 women out of every 100,000 with textured breast implants will develop BIA-ALCL. But the TGA estimates that the disease is more common, affecting 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 1,000 women with breast implants (that agency says it has received no reports of BIA-ALCL in women with smooth implants).

“There is no reason to think it is less likely to develop in women in the U.S., and given the dramatic increase in diagnoses in recent years, it is clear that it was under-diagnosed and under-reported for many years,” Diana Zuckerman, a health advocate who has long questioned the safety of breast implants, told me.  Zuckerman serves as president of both the National Center for Health Research and the Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund, nonprofits based in Washington, D.C.

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Can Breast Implants Cause Cancer? WJLA Investigates

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Kimberly Suiters, ABC7 WJLA: February 6, 2017.

“You have cancer — again.”

“What? Breast cancer?”

“No … a new one.”

So went the conversation between a stunned 40-year-old Raylene Hollrah and the plastic surgeon who performed her reconstructive surgery after she survived breast cancer seven years earlier.

Her new cancer diagnosis? Breast Implant-Associated Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma, or BIA-ALCL for short. Of all the potential side effects of breast implants, she did not recall her surgeon ever mentioning a small but increased risk of cancer.

“I did everything to keep cancer away,” Hollrah told 7 On Your Side. “Yet, I put a device in my body that caused cancer.”

The US Food and Drug Administration is not prepared to say that the textured breast implants Hollrah chose cause lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.

But in 2011 and again in 2016, the FDA cautioned of a “possible association” between ALCL and implants. […]

When 7 On Your Side filed a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA) about ALCL cases reported to the FDA, we received more than 800 documents representing 441 cases, more than one-third unconfirmed, and at least 12 deaths. Even since the 2011 advisory from the FDA about ALCL and implants, when manufacturers responded to reported adverse events, they often listed many risks but didn’t include ALCL. […]

7 On Your Side spoke with a leader in the field of women’s health, Diana Zuckerman, PhD, President of the National Center for Health Research. Zuckerman was our chief source for information about the risk of suicide after implants. Regarding BIA-ALCL, she wrote:

“It is not true that textured implants are the only ones associated with BIA-ALCL. This summary of a recent medical journal article clearly says that “most women with ALCL have at least one textured implant” but that doesn’t mean they all do.

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Breast Implants in France to Carry Cancer Warning: Researchers Find a ‘Clearly Established Link’

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Dana Dovey, Medical Daily: March 18, 2015.

Following France’s National Cancer Institute finding a “clearly established link” between breast implants and a specific type of cancer, the country will now order all breast implants to come with a cancer warning. This announcement came after 18 cases of anaplastic large cell lymphoma were directly linked to women with silicone breast implants since 2011.

Anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) is a type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that affects the blood. The link between breast implants and this form of cancer is extremely rare, so French officials have urged women who already have the implants not to remove them, the Daily Mail reported. Given the severity of the cancer in the few women who do develop it, French officials felt it necessary to inform women of all the possible risks associated with the surgery.

ALCL is extremely rare, affecting around one to six in every three million women who undergo breast augmentation, Medical News Today reported. However, a study conducted by researchers from Cambridge University in the UK found that nearly all cases of ALCL in breasts occurred in patients who had undergone breast augmentation, suggesting a link between the two. […]

Breast implants are a very popular surgery, with Dr. Diana Zukerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, explaining that in 2013 alone 300,000 American women opted for the operation. Of these women, around 80 percent undergo breast enhancement for cosmetic reasons while a further 20 percent have breast implants following breast cancer. […]

 

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FDA explores possible link between breast implants, cancer

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Andrew Zajac, The Los Angeles Times: January 26, 2011.

The Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday that it has begun investigating the possible connection between breast implants and an increased risk of a rare form of cancer.

Though the number of women who may develop the disease is small, there is apparently no way to identify those who are likely to develop it — making it a source of potential concern to all women with the implants.

Among women who do not have implants, the cancer — anaplastic large cell lymphoma, or ALCL — develops in the breast tissue of about 3 out of 100 million women nationwide. [..]

“It raises a red flag about what other immune disease could be occurring that are not obvious,” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families.

The FDA based its announcement on a review of scientific literature between 1997 and last May, which reported 34 cases of ALCL in women with breast implants, as well as other information from international regulatory agencies, scientific experts and implant manufacturers, which turned up additional cases. […]

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