Dr. Robert Whitfield discusses a 2024 study by Dr. Mathun Sina linking bacterial biofilms on breast implants to breast implant illness. Bacteria like Staphylococcus epidermidis produce compounds called oxylipins that appear elevated in patients with BII symptoms, a chronic inflammatory condition that can also stem from Lyme disease, mold, or viral infections.
There was a study done by Dr. Mathun Sina, and it was published in '24, I believe in January '24, that showed that the bacterial biofilm, which is predominantly Staph epidermidis and Cubacterium acnes, can interact with the breast tissue, oxidize the oleic acid, which is just the fatty acid in the breast tissue, and create this biomarker that in a research environment is shown to be oxylipin. And there's different, uh, oxylipins. This one he looked at predominantly was oxylipin-10 hormonidias shown in another paper, a lot of others. And it was shown to be higher in patients who had symptoms consistent with what we described as breast implant illness. Well, so for everybody listening, I'll just define breast implant illness. That's how I think about it, which is it's a chronic inflammatory process of which in this case, a breast implant is playing a role. So you could have the same symptomology without a breast implant. If you think of chronic inflammatory processes like Lyme disease, mold, uh, Epstein-Barr, all, all the parasitic infections, all the chronic infections that, yeah, lead to the same kind of chronic inflammation in the body.
