Recent finding on the risk factors of capsular contracture (breast augmentation)
There was an announcement regarding a finding on the capsular contracture risk factors by Dr. Grant Stevens and 34 others and so I would like to post on that.
When there is a medical finding and announcement, there must be a reasonable number of samples to derive statistics. Also, there should be an appropriate time period that the experiment was conducted.
Therefore, major announcement such as this one, does not come out easily. There are many experts who debate on this finding, showing how important this journal article is.
There were 34 doctors and 2560 breast augmentation patients involved in this research. The data was gathered over a period of 5 years.
Only one type of implant, Sientra (known as SiliMed in Korea) was used, and the main objective was to find out the difference in the capsular contracture incidence rate between the textured type and the smooth type.
The incidence rate of these 2560 patients over 5 years was 7.6%. Some doctors experienced the incidence rate of less than 2% and some over 17% therefore the deviation was rather large.
The risk factors that lead to capsular contracture found from this experiment are
Surface of the implant; Smooth type has higher incidence rate
Incision part; Breast aureole has higher incidence rate than the inframammary fold
Plane; Subglandular has higher incidence rate than subpectoral
Hermatoma and seroma formation leads to higher possibility of capsular contracture
There are other minor ones such as massage, correction bra, size, etc.
Former findings showed that subpectoral had similar incidence rate whether the implant is textured or smooth, but higher incidence rate for subglandular breast augmentation.
But, the current experiments showed that whether it is subpectoral or subglandular, the textured type leads to lower possibility of capsular contracture.
Also, there was a statistical finding that the subpectoral leads to lower possibility as well.
Another finding was that massaging after the breast augmentation causes more cases of capsular contracture.
Massaging was popular in 1970’s and it was perceived that massaging minimizes the possibility of capsular contracture but there weren’t any findings that massaging influences capsular contracture in any way.
Massaging leading to lower possibility of capsular contracture is something of old and should be completely removed today.
The summary of the report is that in order to reduce the capsular contracture, one should use the textured implant, place it under the pectoralis muscle, and conduct inframammary fold incision.
There aren’t convincing contents about the implant size and the usage of the correction bra. Also, the experiment only used the Sientra (SiliMed) implants therefore, there needs to be more supplementary findings or data.
This is all for today.
Thank you for reading.