Breast implants make women suicidal?

Friday August 10, 2007 ins: Breast Enhancement Tag(s):

Technorati Tags: breast implants, breast enhancement, breast augmentation

A new study claims that women with breast implants were three times more likely to commit suicide or to die from drug or alcohol-related causes other than women who haven’t gone under knife to augment their breasts.

This claim is supported by statistics as 22% of deaths among Swedish women with breast implants reflected psychiatric morbidity or a substance abuse or dependence disorder.

However, according to the authors of the August issue of the Annals of Plastic Surgery, silicone implants should not be considered as the culprit.

Rather, "a nontrivial proportion of women undergoing cosmetic breast augmentation may bring with them -- or develop later -- serious long-term psychiatric morbidity and eventually mortality," they wrote.

"Such findings warrant increased screening, counseling, and perhaps post-implant monitoring of women seeking cosmetic breast implants," they added.

The researchers investigated and followed 3,527 women who have had breast augmentation from 1965 to 1994 at an average age of 32. 66% of them were monitored for 15 years or more while 22% for at least 25 years.

The results show that after a mean of 18.7 years, there were 175 deaths – a 30% higher than expected all-cause mortality rate. The major causes to excess mortality were suicide and psychiatric problems.

Suicide was threefold more common among women with implants than expected from the general population.

The researchers noted that the subjects have self-reported high levels of satisfaction and improvements in psychological functioning after breast augmentation.

However, they cautioned: "latent psychiatric instability prior to or following augmentation cannot be ruled out and any immediate psychologic stabilization following the operation may lessen with time."

They also added that further study should be done to assess the need for psychological or psychiatric screening for women seeking cosmetic implant surgery and whether post-implant surveillance is warranted.

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