Hi, I'm Dr. Frank Lista here at The Plastic
Surgery Clinic and we're doing consultations
today where patients come in and talk to me
about surgery. And I've had a few patients
in the last couple of days ask me the same
question: "can my body reject a breast implant?"
Well, here's a breast implant. This is a cohesive
gel breast implant, one of the most common
implants that we use. They also come in saline.
So the short answer is no. You can't reject
a breast implant the way you would reject
an organ, like a kidney transplant. That reaction
- rejection - is an autoimmune reaction, or
a reaction where your immune system attacks
the organ. That doesn't happen with breast
implants because they don't initiate an autoimmune
response. So the answer is no, you can't get
rejection, and I've never seen it, I've been
a plastic surgeon for 25 years and I've never
read about it in the medical literature. Your
body, though, can react to an implant, giving
you a condition called capsular contracture.
Capsular contracture is a condition where
your body forms scar tissue around the implant.
If you have too much scar tissue, then the
scar tissue can get tight and squeeze the
implant and make your breasts feel hard. If
it's really hard, it could actually hurt,
but otherwise the breast looks fine but just
feels hard when you touch it. It's not your
breast going hard, and it's not your implant
going hard, it's just the scar tissue squeezing
the implant like this, and when you touch
it that makes it feel hard. So that's called
capsular contracture. It's not a rejection,
it's a reaction to the implant. So people
say, well what happens if I get capsular contracture?
Well, first of all, it's really rare, somewhere
between 1 and 3% - super low. In fact, we've
just published a paper showing, with smooth
implants placed in our clinic, over 1,000
cases, our capsular contracture rate is 1.3%,
the lowest published rate of any capsular
contracture paper in the world, and so that's
really good. If you are one of the unlucky
1 or 2% to get that, then there's an operation
we can do to fix it, and that operation goes
in, we change the implant and release the
scar tissue, and that usually works. Sometimes,
though, it doesn't work and if it doesn't
work then the patient has a choice: either
live with the implant the way it is, or remove
it. And if you remove it, the hardness goes
away. Lots of people decide just to leave
it if the second operation fails and if they
leave it, the breast looks okay, it just feels
hard if you touch it. So the answer is: no,
you can't reject, your body can't reject an
implant, you can develop capsular contracture,
which is scar tissue, but that's pretty rare
and we can usually fix it. And our super low
rate of capsular contracture is just a reflection
of how well we do things here at The Plastic
Surgery Clinic because we want your operation
to look great and we want it to be super safe.
So thanks for watching, follow us on Twitter
and YouTube and keep updated on the website
because we're always changing it and adding
to my blog and putting in video logs. Thanks
for watching.
