I could rattle off a million reasons why women should not get breast implants. But at the top of my list, and what I have spent my life working on, is the issue of informed consent – a patient fully understanding the risks of this cosmetic surgery before going under the knife. Of course, in my biased opinion, anyone who chooses to undergo breast augmentation clearly does not have a good understanding of what could happen or they wouldn’t do it! But there are very real obstacles in the way of women getting all the necessary information and being able to conduct a good risk assessment, some of which I would like to lay out here:

No one really knows how long implants actually last and what their long-term effects could be.

Breast implants are indeed one of the most researched medical devices, but the research (predominantly paid for by implant manufacturers) has been “front-loaded.” Almost all the safety data collected thus far has been from women who had implants for a relatively short time, less than five years. Implant recipients, however, keep these devices in their bodies for decades. In a recent New York Times article, Dr. Stephen Li, who has served on three of the FDA’s panels that reviewed implant safety, acknowledged that silicone implants are “a device that you have only three or four years of data for,” and admitted that “we don’t know specifically how long implants last.”

There still critical work to be done in looking at the long-term health risks of breast implants. The absence of research in the longer time frame, however, is a fact not widely known or understood, even among plastic surgeons. How, then, can it be conveyed to women?

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