Do Breast Implants Increase Risk of Suicide — Or Are Suicidal Women More Likely to Choose Breast Augmentation?
U.S. News reported this month on a Danish study designed to examine the effect of breast implants for cosmetic suicides on suicide rates.
The researchers studied the records of more than 10,000 women — 2,788 who had cosmetic breast implants; 7,071 who had breast reductions; and 1,736 who had cosmetic surgery other than breast implants.
Of the 2,788 women who had implant surgery, 14 had committed suicide. Of those, half had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems before having implant surgery. In comparison, only a quarter of the women who had breast reduction surgery and committed suicide had a history of being hospitalized for psychiatric problems. According to U.S. News and World Report,
This supports the hypothesis that breast implants don’t drive women to commit suicide but that women who choose to have breast implants may be more likely than the average woman to have underlying psychiatric problems, the authors write.
Unfortunately, U.S. News and World Report doesn’t put that small number of suicides in context. The suicide rate of women in Denmark is only about 11 per 100,000. The suicide rate among the women with breast implants in this study was a whopping 502 per 100,000. So even the rate of suicide among women who had not been previously hospitalized was still an incredibly high 251 per 100,000 — over 22 times the overall level of female suicide in Denmark. It is possible, of course, that the women who had not been previously hospitalized nonetheless had a higher rate of emotional/psychological problems, though it would be impossible to say one way or another with this study’s methodology.
The study also found an overall much higher death rate among women who had breast implant surgery, largely because those women were far more likely to be smokers.
Source:
Breast implants: Are women who have plastic surgery more likely to commit suicide? Helen Fields, U.S. News and World Report, January 12, 2005.
The Do Breast Implants Increase Risk of Suicide — Or Are Suicidal Women More Likely to Choose Breast Augmentation? by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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