Breast implants are safe....

This week, an FDA advisory panel recommended that silicone breast implants be allowed to return to the market with certain restrictions. The plain fact of the matter is that breast implants are safe. If you want to read a good book about the issue, read Marcia Angell's "Science on Trial". Highly recommended.

Sally Satel has just published a nice update on the science behind breast implants. Here's an excerpt:

Wrong. These fears are based solely on anecdotes. In contrast, careful studies show that leaked silicone is not harmful. No device lasts forever, true, and early versions of implants, which have been around since the 1960s, did rupture regularly, at rates of at least 50 percent after 15 years. But, generally, the silicone did not migrate past the fibrous capsule that naturally forms around the implant. Data from the sole examination of rupture incidence rates published in 2003 in The Archives of Surgery indicate that about 20 percent of modern implants rupture within ten years of cosmetic augmentation.

Several respected medical entities have concluded that there is no greater incidence of collagen vascular disease in women with ruptured implants than in those without implants. These include analyses from the Institute of Medicine Report, Safety of Silicone Breast Implants (1999), commissioned by the U.S. Congress; U.K. Independent Review Panel on Silicone Gel Breast Implants (1998); the National Science Panel (1998); and the National Institutes of Health (2004).

And last July, a key study appeared in The Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. It was the first to track individual women whose implants had ruptured, as detected with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and assess potential damage two years later. After monitoring 64 Danish women with at least one ruptured implant, the authors found no change in immunologic markers (indicators of collagen vascular disease). Most striking, in three-quarters of the implants in those 64 women, the rupture was contained in the fibrous capsule, and most of the women did not even know the device had torn. In only four percent of the ruptured implants did small amounts of silicone escape the fibrous capsule.

Please get Angell's book - it's a good case study on how science can be abused.