Cristina Tamba chose a career as a skin therapist because she wanted to help women look and feel good.
But when the Gold Coast resident got breast implants in 2010, she never imagined the cosmetic surgery would backfire on her.
“I decided to get the implants after I had my daughter and I had really bad asymmetry … and it was fashionable at the time,” Ms Tamba said.
“I slowly developed chronic, debilitating anxiety, suicidal thoughts – which was weird – and then a complete loss of bodily functions on the right side of my body and in my bladder.”
The symptoms, along with brain fog, joint pain, fatigue, rashes, and hair loss, are commonly associated with breast implant disease or systemic symptoms associated with breast implants (SSBI).
SSBI is not a recognized medical condition and research on the subject is ongoing.
Mrs Tamba, 39, saw various specialists, including a psychiatrist and a neurologist, but they could not find the underlying cause of her symptoms.
She decided to have her breast implants removed last year in the hope that it would relieve her symptoms.
“As soon as I took them out, the mental brain fog completely disappeared, my vision – which was blurry – disappeared and I didn’t have to take any prescription medication for my anxiety and panic disorder,” Ms Tamba said.
From implants to implants
Breast implant removal, also known as implant surgery, was once a rare procedure but is becoming more common.
Data from the Australian Breast Device Registry (ABDR) shows that implant surgery has increased for patients with implants for cosmetic improvement from 0.4 per cent in 2016 to 7 per cent in 2022.
Implant surgery also increased among those who received implants for reconstructive (post-cancer) purposes from 0.8 percent to 5.2 percent during the same period.
Gold Coast plastic and reconstructive surgeon Peter Widdowson, who has been practicing for more than 40 years, has seen the trend first-hand.
“I see more and more people coming along with the condition [SSBI] where the patient himself had been ill for a number of years,” he said.
“They come in, they want their breast implants out, thinking the breast implant itself was a foreign body … and they just want to be healthy without having any foreign body or breast implant in them.”
Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons president Nicola Dean said SSBI was not the only reason more women were having implants removed.
He said personal preference and greater awareness of other health risks, such as breast implant-related anaplastic large cell lymphoma, were contributing factors.
“Some women say, ‘I don’t want to get breast implants if it’s going to put me at risk of medical problems down the line,'” Dr. Dean said.
“The pain was just terrible”
Breast cancer survivor Julie Roberts decided to get implants after having a double mastectomy in 2012.
The 66-year-old Gold Coast resident had her implants replaced three times in a decade because they repeatedly fell out and suffered symptoms similar to Ms Tamba’s.
“The pain was just terrible – I used to walk hunched over all the time,” said Mrs Roberts.
She had the implants removed last year and underwent a form of reconstructive surgery that involved transferring tissue from the abdomen to recreate the breasts.
The operation was intense, but Ms Roberts said it left her feeling like her “old self” again.
“I’m not in pain and my chest is really soft and warm,” she said.
“They feel like me, whereas before the implants were rock hard and cold.”
The benefits of abstraction
A first study in Australia showed that many women experienced relief after implant surgery.
Doctors studied 226 women who experienced SSBI to better understand the condition.
For the 77 women who had surgery, 85% experienced a significant reduction in the severity and number of symptoms after six months.
Sydney plastic surgeon and Macquarie University Health Sciences Center professor Anand Deva, who led the research, said the results were promising, but identifying the actual cause of the symptoms required more research.
“These findings alone should signal both patients who think they have SSBI and colleagues examining these women to take this very seriously, rule out other diseases, and then by all means offer to these women implant removal,” he said.
Approximately 22,000 breast implant insertions were reported in the ABDR in 2022.
Dr Deva urged plastic surgeons to make sure women were aware of the risks before surgery and to have their implants checked regularly.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Aged Care said it recognized the importance of the new data to “help guide regulatory decision-making” and encouraged patients and healthcare professionals to report any adverse events while research into SSBI continued.
