Mechanisms of Breast Implant Toxicity: Will the Real Ringmaster Please Stand Up

1.       Abstract

 The past five years have witnessed a recurrent public health debacle encompassing illness caused by silicone gel-filled breast implants. In an attempt to explain this epidemiologic reality, researchers from many institutions have resurrected the faulty device-related autoimmune theories of the early 1990’s. These researchers are genuinely convinced that breast implants initiate a novel disease, but their methodology utilized to prove this premise is unsound. The inability to consider mechanisms of widespread biochemical disruptions caused by in vivo exposure to organ silicon molecules is coexisting with multiple deficiencies in detecting the voluminous clinical manifestations of ailing implant recipients. Chief among the latter are the use of truncated data bases to record symptoms and signs, coupled with the lack of appreciation that silicone-induced disease evolves chronologically in a manner simulating a dose-response curve. This failure to correlate the diverse clinical features present in toxic breast implant recipients with logical mechanisms of disease causation provides a clear understanding of why the silicone breast implant chaos of the early 1990’s was inevitably destined to repeat itself.

 2.       Keywords: Biochemistry; Breast implants; Indexing terms; Silicone; Toxicity