Are Your Implants Giving You Autoimmune Disease?

Hey, it's Dr. Whitfield, private practice plastic surgeon in Austin, Texas. This is my breast Implant illness podcast. And today we're going to discuss can breast implants cause autoimmune diseases? And so this is always very controversial and a lot of blame goes to not just breast implants, but all sorts of implants because people who have implants typically have more problems with autoimmune diseases. So your body has a set of defenses that protects you. And when your immune system attacks your own cells, that's basically an autoimmune disease. And there's a whole host of these. And we can go into that in just a moment. True to form, in most cases we don't actually know. So I think, as everybody's probably gathered by listening to my show is I'm not super accepting of the I don't know answer. So curious about this and I'll give my 2 cents and my thoughts about it. I think most of what we consider to be autoimmune issues will be a combination of pre existing genetics, you know, certain systems, you know, issues that may be enzyme related, what have you. You do that, you couple it to some sort of environmental exposure or infection or virus or something and then you trigger this effect, stress in life. You know, there's all sorts of things that this, this kind of plethora of, you know, diseases can come from. And you know, people are like, well, how do you figure out if you even have one? And tests that could be done to diagnose this, or the antinuclear antibody test, autoantibody tests, see reactive protein, and the list goes on and on. Now I will, I will tell you, I'm 53 and those tests have not changed since I've been alive. Those are the exact same tests I would have ran when I was a med student or when I was in college. And you know, the said rate, that's a little frightening because I think we're on the 14th edition of the iPhone already and I haven't seen a great deal of evolution in allopathic medicine when it comes to testing. And so, all right, you get all these tests done and you have breast implant, you know, for whatever reason, cosmetics, cancer, reconstruction, you have breast implants. And now you're having, you know, concern or your physicians having concern that you have an autoimmune disorder. And these tests are ordered and we'll, you know, we'll say your AA is high and your sed rate's high. And you know, you have all these other things, fatigue, muscle and joint pain, you know, just generalized, don't feel well. Maybe your thyroid's not even, you know, the issue, maybe it's something else. And now you're getting worked up for these. And, you know, the common autoimmune disorders that I see people that have been worked up for are multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto's Graves disease, celiac disease, Sjogren's, lupus, and that's kind of the, the main ones I see. And so when, when you have a test abnormality like that, you're going to get refute, I'm sorry, referred to, you know, immunologist, a rheumatologist, maybe a heme oncologist. And they're going to evaluate you and try to figure out, you know, how best to help you. And so what do you think these doctors who ultimately are charged with trying to care for you and, and relieve your symptoms doing to help with that? And so once again, this is, you know, this is, these are limitations of allopathic medicine. All right, we have these tests that haven't changed since, you know, I've been around, and you have these symptoms and then what's the program? You know, it's not an injury. So you're not going to get physical therapy and rehab, something. You have these aches and pains and, and maybe swelling and fatigue and. All right, so what are we going to do to, to deal with that? So traditionally they'll put people on maybe steroids, something like a prednisone dose orally. They may in fact try you on Plaquenil. Be prescribed for this would be methotrexate. And what are these all really doing? All right, so nobody knows actually what's wrong. They're just trying to decrease your inflammation. Okay, you have inflammation. And in full disclosure, breast implants came about in the early 60s by Cronin and Jerome in Houston. 61 2, if you want to, you know, time stamp it. But the disorders I just mentioned were described in the 1700s and 1800s. So you're over, you know, 100, 150 years later in many instances. And whether it's a breast implant, hip implant, knee implant, of course you have more symptoms if you are already predisposed to those in your family history, which that's what I see commonly. And when I was doing mostly oncologic reconstruction, we had a patient come in who had Sjogren's or rheumatoid or lupus or what have you and had breast cancer. I would typically try to find a non implant related option to help them because I didn't want to further aggravate them by adding a foreign body to what obviously already is complicated for them and, and their immune system. So it follows suit that I see a lot of these folks who have developed these kind of autoimmune type, you know, symptoms that have been, you know, categorized this way. So my first inclination, you know, for example, if somebody comes in who's in their 30s and they've been diagnosed, you know, preliminarily with MS, and that's the only thing they can find because they had a lesion on their brain scan or, or where the symptoms match and they had this scan and I was just like, oh, wow. So let's, let's step back and let's try to figure out how we can manage this. And it goes back to my program where I evaluate things that really promote inflammation. So what's your genetic predisposition? What toxicities have you been exposed to from the environment, your food, heavy metals, mycotoxins? Do you have food sensitivities? Are you having constipation, diarrhea? Have you taken different drugs that affected your immune system before you ever got implants? You have Accutane as a teenager that create leaky gut for you. There's all sorts of things that you really, really have to look at if you're going to help these patients who are now obviously trying to correlate this. And you know, they show up to my office and I, you know, go back and try to figure out like, what in their history tipped them, you know, did they start out with bad genetic predisposition and then they got implants and things got wildly worse because their inflammation dramatically increased. Did they move? Did they get exposed to mold somehow? Did they work in a place where they got exposed to parabens or benzenes? Did they eat a lot of food that had phthalates, organophosphates or glyphosate or, or something. What, what changed, if anything, that we can figure out and how can we better reduce inflammation for them? And you know, once you think of it that way, I feel like you're, you're helping the patient get on the right track. And the kind of aggressive way to treat it is to diminish as much as possible inflammation. After identifying root causes of inflammation, pre existing family history or pre existing autoimmune conditions prior to, you know, placement versus okay, what type of implants are they? How long have they been in place? Has there been more than one surgery? Has there been complications? And go from there because there's always, you know, that as well. I'm not discounting the role of the implants, it's just one factor that I look at because if you don't look at everything, you definitely will miss something. And I missed an implant infection on my very first case of breast implant, you know, illness. And I was like not doing that anymore. Couldn't figure out how I've missed it. Anyway, patient didn't have any signs or symptoms that were consistent with infection other than fatigue. So now obviously we look at this very critically and really drill down on root causes. So you know, people had autoimmune diseases since the 1700s and 1800s. So obviously breast implants, hip implants, knee implants, dental implants aren't responsible for all autoimmune diseases. Certainly when you add an implant of any of those varieties, including obviously breast implants into the mix of somebody who's got that genetic predisposition or environmental exposures or you know, toxicity for some reason, something off, you know, then you're really setting them up or setting, you know, the, the, the immune system up for a lot of stress. So I think, you know, as we continue to do more and more evaluation with clinical research and, and basic science research, we'll continue to better understand, you know, how, you know, this process is happening. And it always, to me it's like I just go back to genetics. Like at some point it's going to be determined either on an HLA or a specific SNP single nucleotide polymorphism. There's or copies of genes and SNPs there's going to be something more and more specific to this that really highlights why this is going on. I look critically at vitamin D pathways, antioxidant pathways, methylation pathways and the glucuronidation pathways. But you know, those don't explain all of this and what we're seeing. So if you have an autoimmune disorder or your family history is one where that's an issue, gotta really reflect on that and get in full disclosure a well rounded explanation of potential, you know, essentially what could happen with breast implants in a breast augmentation. So as everybody knows, I don't and haven't put in breast implants in for a couple years or for several years now. And majority of my practice was focused around taking care of cancer reconstruction problems and cosmetic problems. I was primary augmentation was never my forte really. It was more about complex problems related to breast and I think autologous fat transfer is a way to go. It's certainly going to be a, a safer route in many instances to help people achieve an aesthetic change. Obviously, it's not the same change that you would get with a breast implant because breast implants are more obviously fixed volume rigid devices compared to fat which layers out around your existing tissue. So, I mean, there are ways to do this. And certainly when I did breast cancer reconstruction, we used microsurgery and used the DIEP free flap. And I've had many patients contact me and say they had prosthetic mesh used during that operation, which was never the case. When we did the operation, it was a muscle and nerve sparing procedure and done with a very high rate of success. And I was very proud of that work, still am, because I feel like that autologous reconstruction, that really puts patients in good positions when all things being equal, everything goes well, that's a durable reconstruction, that's autologous. Their own tissue, they're not going to have a reaction. And it was a great option too, to convert a existing implant based reconstruction that may have had problems or complications or capture contraction or infection or something and really take care of that for the patient. So I think, you know, there are options and we need to continue as before to do further research and raise awareness about breast implant illness. And feel free to share this podcast with anybody you think it would benefit. We want to expand, you know, the awareness and thank you for listening to this.