Symptoms and risks of a break

What are the symptoms of a prosthetic break?

It is important to know what type of implant we have to identify the symptoms that its breakage can produce.

1. Saline prosthesis: its rupture usually produces deflation of the prosthesis, which implies that we will notice a loss of volume and shape in the affected breast. It can be abrupt at the time of the break or notice it progressively in a few days.

2. Silicone gel prosthesis: in most cases it does not produce symptoms and tends to go unnoticed. Sometimes it can cause pain, burning, or a feeling of small lumps in the chest or armpit.

What is a silent or silent break?

What is a silent or silent tear? When a breast implant breaks, some women may notice reduced breast size, lumps or small lumps, uneven appearance of the breast, pain, itching, swelling, numbness, burning, or change. in sensitivity. However, most tears occur without symptoms.

Most silicone gel prosthesis breaks do not give symptoms that alert us to what has happened. They do not cause pain or noticeable physical changes in the chest. That is why they tend to go unnoticed. This imperceptible behavior causes them to be called “silent or silent breaks” due to their apparent silence regarding what is happening.

What are the risks of breaking a prosthesis?

The materials used to fill the prostheses are neither toxic nor harmful to our body. Therefore, the break does not imply an emergency situation or a life risk.

In intracapsular ruptures, the content of the prosthesis is contained in the implant area and the health risks are almost non-existent.

When the rupture becomes extracapsular and the content of the filler spreads, it comes into contact with other tissues and can cause alterations due to the reaction it generates, since our body identifies it as a foreign body. One of the most frequent is the creation of granulomas by invading the lymph nodes in the armpit or chest. In any case it is a foreign substance to our body that must be removed.

Is there a relationship between prosthetic rupture and breast cancer?

There is no evidence of a relationship between implant rupture and breast cancer, or any other type of cancer or systemic disease.

Sometimes the prosthesis rupture can invade the lymph nodes in the area and assimilate to the initial signs that a tumor would produce in the area, which will force us to rule out that possibility and in any case to remove the affected nodes.