As you guys know, I do a ton of liquid silicone injections every day.  I was asked a question today by one of my lovely patients about the relationship of silicone and the potential for collagen vascular disease.  I decided instead of just answering the question off the cuff that I would read to her an excerpt from a review article published in Nov/Dec 2005 in the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery entitled:  ”Permanent Injectables for Soft Tissue Augmentation:  Avoiding Misinformation and a Reprise of the Breast Implant Debacle”.  

Here is the excerpt that is helpful:  ”Starting in the early 1990s, numerous investigators attempted to clarify the debate spurred by case reports and anectodal data by designing large, systematic studies to quantify the strength of association between breast implants and connective tissue disease, if any.  The most convincing of these investigations involved approximately 6 large retrospective cohort studies that followed up patients with breast implants for up to 10 years or longer and detected no increased associated risk of connective tissue disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, systemic lupus erythematosus, polymyositis/dermatomyositis, Sjogren syndrome, and mixed connective tissue disease.  At least 3 of these studies, from the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn), Sweden, and Denmark aspired to being population based on querying female health professionals enrolled up to several hundred thousand subjects each, thus greatly minimizing the risk that even small adverse effects would fail to be detected owing to inadequate sample size.  While biases, including selection bias, recall bias, and information or measurement bias, may have skewed the results of individual studies, collectively they yielded results that were close to unequivocal.”  

Further, the article goes on and cites a meta-analysis in which studies actually showed a LOWER incidence of collagen vascular disease in patients with silicone implants than those with non-silicone implants.  That is the reason that silicone breast implants are back on the market.  Now, although liquid silicone is radically different from solid silicone or gel silicone implants, the question that I often get is, “Does silicone cause problems with collagen vascular disease or autoimmune disease?”  That is the reason for this very long blog.  Hopefully, you have found it helpful and as unbiased as possible.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Lam Facial Plastics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.