Managing Patients with Textured Implants

On this The Aesthetic Society Round Table, board certified plastic surgeons Dr. Brad Calobrace of Louisville, Dr. Pat McGuire of St. Louis, and Dr. Jeffrey Kenkel and Dr. Louis Strock, both of Dallas, join together to discuss managing patients with textured implants going forward. Once a style of implant that offered surgeons a powerful tool with future promise, their connection with Breast Implant-Associated Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma, an extremely rare cancer, has put them into a questionable light.

BIA-ALCL is certainly real and seems to be exclusive to breast augmentation performed with textured implants. This has been an unfortunate turn of events because, in the opinion of many plastic surgeons, textured implants are the ideal implants to use in certain cases. And while the chances of BIA-ALCL remain extremely low, it is disconcerting for patients to be told that the disease is seemingly exclusive to textured implants, and thus will likely choose something else.

That said, there are thousands of patients who already have textured implants from a previous surgery. The situation for these patients is a timeline of maintenance and check-ups. As Dr. McGuire mentions, the vast majority of those patients will never come down with BIA-ALCL and thus their textured implants shouldn’t be a worry or burden. Still, and even with numbers at their back, it can be difficult for surgeons to discuss maintaining implants that are now known to be correlated with a specific cancer.

The breast augmentation veterans and implant experts discuss this and more to furnish insight regarding this unique situation in breast surgery on the latest Aesthetic Surgery Round Table.

No Spin Live from The Plastic Surgery Channel on Vimeo.