Robert Whitfield MD discusses breast implant illness, a condition causing chronic inflammation, brain fog, and heart problems. Bacteria and biofilm around implants may trigger these symptoms, with research showing staphylococcus biofilm upregulates inflammatory markers. In his patients, a different organism appears more common than staph.
They get chronic inflammatory symptoms, they get gut dysfunction, they get brain fog, they get, you know, arrhythmias, they get shortness of breath. Like every system becomes affected.
Is that because the bacteria is able to spread outside the implant and the biofilm grows elsewhere beyond the implant?
So that's not known yet, but there is a current study that was done. It upregulates something called tinhome. So when staph is around an implant, that biofilm upregulates tendon. It increases the symptomology of breast implant illness. In my patient population, the predominant organism, the bacteria, is not staph, it's this cutie bacteria.
