News for women considering breast augmentation cosmetic surgery

Breast augmentation continues to be one of the leading, if not the leading, cosmetic procedures in my office. It is a wonderful operation.

Perhaps the major drawback is the fact that one or both breasts can become hard due to encapsulation. Every patient will get a capsule in response to a foreign body. This is a normal response.

The key is to keep the breast/implant soft. There have been many theories bantered about as to why one breast will suddenly get hard 3 or more years after surgery.

Recently, one plastic surgeon who did implant exchanges submitted the capsules for microscopic analysis. They saw cotton fibriles through out the capsular tissue studied.

One plastic surgeon recently stopped using cotton products during the course of his operations and saw capsular contracture reduce from 10% to less than 0.5%.

That's impressive.

So we are looking into getting non-cotton sponges for our procedures. Who knows - it all may help.