Studies: Women With Breast Implants Have Higher Suicide Rate
Two recent studies of women with breast implants confirmed what previous studies had found — such women had a higher suicide rate than women without breast implants.
A Dutch looked at the cause of death for 3,521 Swedish women who had breast implant surgery between 1965 and 1993. In that group there were 15 suicides. In a similar group of women who had not had breast implant surgery, however, there were only 5 suicides.
Another study in Finland looked at 2,166 women who had breast implant surgery between 1970 and 2000. It also found about a three-fold increase in suicides compared to the regular population, and 6 of the 10 suicides among those women occurred within five years of the breast implantation surgery.
There are a number of possibilities to explain the increase in suicides.
One possibility is that women with serious psychological disorders related to feelings about their body seek out breast implantation surgery. Researchers in both studies urged that cosmetic surgeons do more to screen patients for psychological problems.
Another possibility is that this is simply demographics — young whites tend to have the highest rate of suicide and also tend to be disproportionately select cosmetic surgery.
Finally, European countries tend to have very high rates of suicide as it is. American Society of Plastic Surgeons president Dr. James Wells told Reuters Heath that there doesn’t appear to be any increase in suicides among breast implant recipients in the United States,
We’ve been looking at the U.S. breast implant patient population for many, many years and there has been no evidence of increased suicide rates.
Sources:
Women with breast implants more likely to commit suicide. Mark Kaufman, October 4, 2003.
Study: Women with breast implants have threefold higher suicide risk. Joann Loviglio, Associated Press, September 12, 2003.
Breast implant suicide risk. The BBC, March 7, 2003.
Cosmetic breast implants may raise suicide risk. Reuters Health, October 3, 2003.
The Studies: Women With Breast Implants Have Higher Suicide Rate by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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