Episode 17: Dangers Your Breast Implants May Be Concealing with Dr. Mithun Sinha

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Dr. Rob Whitfield, the board certified plastic surgeon specializing in explant surgery. Breast implant illness is a topic that is not often talked enough about, especially in medical community, but is something that affects many women. In this podcast I will be discussing the latest research, treatment options and personal stories of women who have undergone explant surgery in an effort to heal breast implant illness. In this podcast, we'll explore the symptoms of breast implant illness and delve into the latest surgical techniques for explantation and the recovery process. Whether you are currently experiencing breast implant illness or are considering explant surgery, this podcast is a valuable resource for anyone looking to take control of their health and wellness. So let's dive in. Welcome to my show. Today I have Dr. Muthoon Sina. He is a distinguished PhD scientist who has really put forth the most work I I have ever seen to date regarding breast implant illness and its actual scientific evidence for existence. Welcome to my show, Dr. Cena. It's great to have you on.

Thank you, Rob, thank you for inviting me to your podcast.

Oh, Dr. Cena and I have had many talks off the record about this problem and when I was first told about his work, I wasn't a believer because I was so deep into my own clinical work at the time. And having done thousands of explants at this point, I think his work is the preeminent work in the field, as backed up by a physician scientist from Michigan about his work. But please, Dr. Cena, kind of explain this whole role of fatty acids, bacteria and implants in our patients.

Dr. Whitfield, thank you again. It's my pleasure to be here and explain to your audience the sort of research that, that we are doing. So let me take the audience back to when the first life was, you know, formed, the first science of life did not have what we usually are hearing these days, a DNA or rna. It was just a cell, a simple cell with fatty acids around it, which we call as the lipid bilayer, a single cell with fatty acids. The importance is the fatty acids and they are so critical for the structure of life. That is what protect every single cell. That gives the cell its stability, its protection. And that's where the contents of the cells are housed in, inside the lipid bilayer that forms the periphery.

So is that like the fence around my house? Is it just protecting my house?

That's the fence around the house. So there is a fence around every cell and then there is a fence on the top of the skin. So if you take the skin, there's a lot of lipids associated with the skin that performs the primary barrier. So that is the most critical element in the life, more important than DNA or rna, because that's where life evolved.

So the lipid is just really the fat. So you're saying fats are super important. We always talk about proteins and fats on my show. We talk about carbs being kind of bad. So if we have all of this super important fat in the breast, which is where you're going to go with this, how does it interact with that breast scar capsule around the implant and anything bad that's sitting on the surface of the implant.

Okay, so the way fat works there is a slight difference between fat and fatty acid. Let me explain it in a way. So you have a steel rod and attached to that rod, three wooden matchstick. Just imagine. Okay, so there is a steel rod, attached to that rod are three wooden matchstick.

Hey, Dr. Cena, explain this fat or fatty acid combination that's working in the breast.

Yeah, so the, the fatty acid, you know, breast, breast is rich in fat. And the fatty acid that we have searched, researched over here is called a particular type. You know, there are different types of fatty acids present in the body here. We call it like say for example, fatty acid X. And that fatty acid acts as oleic acid. Now what happens when you put an implant in the breast tissue that creates an oxidative environment? Things can get oxidized at that point of time. And that's what exactly happens to this particular fatty acids, which is called as the oleic acid. It forms into another compound or a product, a byproduct, which is called 10 Home. And formation of this product is linked with a particular type bacterial colonization, called as the bacterial biofilm. So I will come to that later, but just for the sake of convenience, the host that is your body, the body fat and the biofilm, they interact and converts this oleic acid to a byproduct called AS10 home, which is immunogenic. So it is produced there, but does not stay there. It goes through the body and can trigger certain immune metabolic pathways, which could lead to some of the symptoms, which is like fatigue, brain fog exhibited by patients with BII or ssbi.

So I want to make one comment because you said the so bacteria for the audience collects forms a, a group of bacteria, like a colony or a little city of bacteria, if we want to call it that, a village. And that is a biofilm that interacts with the tin home. The tin home is the fatty acid. And so from that Standpoint between the scar capsule, that may be a little hard to understand. How does that communication or interaction happen between what's outside versus what's inside?

Well, it interacts with the fatty acid is oleic acid. The interaction leads to the formation of two. Now you have nicely brought another player in the game that is called as the Scar capsule. Now, if you look in the in my publication, the scar capsule is nothing but a very nicely woven fabric. Just like the fabric we are wearing, the threads are on top of that fabric. If you go deep into that fabric, that scar capsule is a nicely woven fabric. If you see my paper, it is there. And that fabric, what do we know? If you are coloring the fabric, where is the color sitting? It is sitting within the fabric. The texture of the fabric determines what type of color will bind to it. So those have binding capabilities. So this particular fabric, which is made up of a biological compound called as collagen, the scar capsule enables the bacteria to sit and form what you recently said, a very nice city. Usually the bacteria, the ones we know, they work alone, you know, they don't form cities, but in the biofilm they form cities. So for the city, they need the land. And that scar capsule provides them the, the prime piece real estate to sit and then grow.

All right, so everybody listening. If you had a hole in your clothes or you had a thin fabric, basically he's telling you that those interactions are going to happen in real time. It's the same thing I see when I see a ruptured device and people tell me it's contained or intracapsular on mri, most of the time I find that is actually not the case, just like he described, because the material over that ruptured device that's leaking silicone everywhere is not a completely sealed environment. It's porous. If everybody understand it's able to transmit across that environment because of what he said, it's like a woven fabric. So with that being said, now you've shown in your paper that if you take this product, Oxylite 10 home and inject it into another model, that you can reproduce symptoms. Can you explain how that works?

That's very interesting. So when we identified this particular product to be present over there, we had no clue that whether it's an epiphenomena, what epiphenomena is the both of them happen to be at the same time. Like we travel in trains, in flights with multiple people. So many people are there on the flight. That does not mean that two people are associated or one is because of the other. And that's how the only way you can prove those things is going through animal models. Before going to the animal models, obviously you have to see them on different cell lines. So the cell lines are obtained from different types of tissues which were obtained from people, you know, and then they were grown. So we tested them on the cell lines. And once we were assured that 10 home is linked and associated, then the next question was that forget about the bacteria, forget about the biofilm. If we can inject this particular fatty acid in animals and what animals here we have used mice, then can we recapitulate or, or simulate some type of symptoms that you see in the patient? Now, obviously the mice cannot talk about whether they have brain fog or not. But one thing that they we can study is fatigue. And there are multiple ways to study animal fatigue. One of them, which is shown in this paper, and there is a very nice sweet video, is that you can train the animals. Mice are very clever. You can train them how to run on treadmills. There are murine treadmills. So they will run on the treadmills, okay. And so you have to practice them, make the practice. And now you inject them with the stern home over a period of time and then see are they running on the treadmill in the similar way or are they stopping more? So if they're stopping more, that's an indicative of that they are getting tired. Obviously, you don't make these animals to run on treadmills for hours. It's short duration, 10 minutes. So in 10 minutes they are pretty fast. They don't get tired that quick. So that's your unit of time. So you check in that 10 minutes how many times the animal is stopping with or without the 10 home injection. The video is over there. So we very nicely saw that those which animals, the cohort of the animals which caught 10 home stopping more. So possibly they were exhibiting fatigue like symptoms.

So for everybody listening, for many, many years, I've taken care of breast cancer patients, cosmetic patients with implants. I've done various procedures to help them. In cancer patients, I've helped them do what's called an aesthetic flap procedure. I've converted them to diep, free flap breast reconstruction, taken out all of the scar capsule, all of the implant material. So all these things started early in my career. Later on in my career, as Everybody knows, in 2016, I had a cosmetic patient who came to me because of extreme fatigue. She actually ended up having an E. Coli infection. So a much different problem of severity. But no external signs or symptoms so that everybody understands that many of the techniques we've used for many, many years in medicine are very antiquated. What Dr. Thina is describing is really, it's, you know, groundbreaking in terms of what he's offering to explain something, the cause and effect relationship with what I see on a day to day basis in my clinic. I want to thank him and his entire group for highlighting women who have breast implants, who have biofilm and go through very arduous process of trying to learn what's going wrong, what's bothering them, what's creating these symptoms of fatigue, dry eyes, myalgias, nerve pain, gut problems, the list goes on and on and on. And these women routinely are not taken care of very well. And in terms of what is done surgically, that's for another time. I want to thank Dr. Cena for being on and I look forward to sharing his paper with you. It will be in my show notes. We look forward to doing a follow up about his next paper that's coming out and if you have any questions regarding this, please post them in our comments and we'll try to answer them directly. If I cannot answer them, I will make sure that I get the comment to Dr. Cena. Thank you again.

Thank you.

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Thank you, Rob. Thank you for inviting me again.

All right, so you have this great paper coming out in the aesthetic surgery journal. Actually it's out now, we've talked about it. But now you're looking at different types of oxylipin tenum which you already examined in your first paper and we discussed on our show. And these are hopefully what I can now measure and you can measure in patients to really highlight how much inflammation they're experiencing.

Yeah. So you know, continuing with our past discussion, so when we identified 10 home, the immediate question that we had that there are other types of precursor fatty acids, they can lead to other derivatives. And hence we started our next series of investigation where we looked into 15 different types of oxyls which all could be derived from the derivatives of the fatty acids present in the breast tissue under oxidative environment.

Hey, can I ask you again to just so the audience, so they understand. So when we get stressed or when we're working hard or when we're exercise, what does that do in terms of oxidation? Does it go up in our bodies, down in our bodies? What's happening so that I can make it more easy for the audience?

They go up in the body. So whenever you, you work out that leads to increased levels of oxygen and that leads to some, something that is known in the, well known in the chemical world, generation of free radicals. And those free radicals leads to increased oxidation. Now obviously in the body there are mechanisms to take those things out because a lot of free radicals are not good. But then also there is a way to. Oxidation is also required for the regular physiological, that is the normal processes that is happening in your body.

But my patients have these feelings where they're inflamed, they feel puffy, they feel swollen, they can't lose weight, they may be tired, they may have anxiety, they may have trouble with their digestive system. Could all this be byproducts of that increased level of oxidation or stress in their bodies?

It will be difficult to assign everything to increased level of oxidation. But yes, that could be one of the contributing factors.

And do the Oxylipin 10 homes that you've profiled, these are molecules that may lead to some of those experiences that they have with those symptoms?

That's correct. That is the possibility. And that's what this is. Again, if you look into the PubMed on the amount of research that is being done on breast implant illness, you will hardly come across less than 300 articles you know, that's very, very, very minuscule. So what my work leads to the path that you can now have possible again, this has to be seen in more patients. Possible biomarker. A set of biomarker of oxalipins which includes 10 home, nine home and few others, which if profiled can help a physician. What does biomarker do? It helps us to predict earlier. So it can help to predict if that particular patient with the implant is going to show BII or SSBI symptoms. And if that patient is showing symptoms, what level of, you know, extent of symptoms will that patient be showing. And, and post explantation, are your oxylipin level coming down? So that's another question that you can ask.

So what Dr. Sina is really highlighting is something that's haunted me because I haven't had a way to follow this and I've been criticized and kind of, you know, it's bothered me a ton because I'm very curious about problems, as Dr. Sina knows. And I don't like not understanding problem. So it's taken thousands of do cases to help kind of, you know, clarify my mind. What we should do to help these patients by understanding their genetics, their toxicity burdens, their gut health, other sensitivity issues. They may have hormonal imbalances. And both he and I are very interested in these products and these products can be identified now on testing through metabolomics. So these breakdown products which he's describing, oxylipin, tenhome and other oxylipin products, we're very interested, both he and I are very interested, interested in looking at these and trying to track them over time with our patients. Because as I look at it in my paper that will be published shortly, about 29% of patients have a contaminant. And his paper is different than mine. They have a paper that shows staph epidermidis is the predominant organism causing biofilm. And mine it's cutie bacterium acnes. And the thing that bothers me is there's actually papers out there that say that number is higher. 48% in one paper that's quoted quite a bit. So my point in publishing ours was to show that it is actually much lower, number one. So I guess we can take some solace in that. But the other is how do we characterize this and follow it? Because that's all the patients want to know. One is do they have unfortunately a breast implant associated cancer which unfortunately happens. Do they have breast cancer? Which I got a call about today on one of my patients, do they have an infection which I've already discussed on my show ad nauseam, or do they have biofilm? Or do they have nothing or do what is the next thing that these patients have? But they all want to lower their inflammation and get back to, you know, feeling better so they can carry out just their routine activities of daily living, take care of their families, take care of themselves. So I want everybody to look in my show notes and we'll link this paper so it's available to everybody if you would comment, Share like this episode of the show, we would appreciate it. We will try to answer all of your questions as they come in regarding Oxylipin 10 home and its other accompanying 10 home molecules. But we think these are amazing papers that Dr. Cena and his group have been able to publish. Thank you again for being on my show, Dr. Cena.

Thank you. Thank you doctor visit.

Thanks for joining me today. I hope you found the information and stories shared on this podcast helpful and informative. Remember, taking control of your health and wellness is key to recovery from breast implant illness. If you're looking for additional resources and support, be sure sure to visit our online store, Dr. Rob's Solutions at drrobsolutions.myshopify.com you'll find a wide range of wellness products and supplements to support your journey to recovery. From specially formulated detox supplements to personalized skincare products, we have everything you need to aid your recovery. Visit Dr. Rob's Solutions today at drrobssolutions.myshopify.com thank you for listening listening and we'll be back with another episode soon. Remember, you're not alone in this journey and together we can overcome breast implant illness. Take care. Of.