Dr. Robert Whitfield reviews 30 years of silicone breast implant complications. Early implants had thick walls and thin gel that leaked easily, causing capsular contracture, ruptures, infections, and cancer concerns. Modern versions address these issues but problems persist.
0.075 millimeters to 0.75 millimeters.
6,000 to 38,000 Daltons.
Almost 30 years.
Peters published about that. And then now we move into the first generation of silicone implants placed by a Cronin and Giraud, developed by Dale Corning. In the first generation, a thick wall and thick gel. And so we'll talk as we go through generations of implants and it changes, but the thickness ranged from 0.075 millimeters to 0.75 millimeters. And the gel consisted of a low molecular weight, either 6,000 to 38,000 Daltons, which is silicone fluid. And so silicon, always think of it. Silicone can be basically liquid, or if you remember the space shuttle, the black part of the space shuttle knows what with silicone. So it has this wide range that can, you know, be as firm as that on the space shuttle or is liquid, you know, as syrup. That's how I kind of think about it. And dealing with these different vintages of implants over the time of my career, which is almost 30 years at this point, has been very different. You know, the, the issues that have arisen from implants are not limited to, but include capture contracture, a concept called gel bleed, rupture infections, biofilm contamination, as we'll go into later, and there's breast implant associated cancers, more of which have been seen in the past decade.
