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Faulty Breast Implants Starts Worldwide Scare!

by Breast.com
?A series of silicone breast implant failures in Europe last year ago has blossomed into a full-blown worldwide health scare as women in more than 65 countries learned they could have faulty implants in place that could rupture and leak a questionable type of silicone gel. The French company Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) was shut down and its products banned after it was learned the company made implants containing an unapproved type of silicone gel that caused high implant rupture rates. Unfortunately, the faulty implants have been given to tens of thousands of women in the last decade, mainly in South America and Western Europe. Today, health officials in more than a dozen countries are advising women with PIP implants to get them removed.
 
The faulty PIP implants were never sold in the United Sates, but the seriousness of the incident underscores the fact that any type of breast implants can be potentially dangerous and that even one quarter of the supposed “good” implants on the market must be removed within four years, because neighboring tissues develop a rigid envelope of fibrous tissue to protect themselves from the implant’s foreign substance. The human body is equipped with a complex surveillance system for recognizing man-made surgical devices like breast implants, hip replacements, and pacemakers as foreign invaders, and naturally works to eliminate them.
 
In an effort to prevent breast implant rejections, a start-up company based in the Science Park in Ecublens on the campus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne has come up with a new a protective covering made up of a nanostructured surface and a layer of collagen that is hoped to prevent the body from rejecting breast implants in the future. The Labseed Company’s major accomplishment is a surface treatment technology called “MYcoat” that renders foreign bodies virtually “invisible” to human cells charged with watching out for foreign invaders. The new surface treatment technology that combines nano/microtechnology and biochemistry could be commercially available as early as 2013.
 
Thanks to the MYcoat collagen-coated surface, neighboring cells are not in direct contact with an implant, and the body ‘sees’ the nanometer-structured surface as normal tissue and does not attempt to reject it. The body’s natural fibroblast structures can then attach naturally to the foreign object just as if it was part of the patient’s normal body. Labseed’s collagen-coating has already been approved for use on silicon implants and because the new technique will require an additional step at the end of the manufacturing process, discussions are underway with the major breast implant manufacturers who hope to integrate the coating into their products by mid-2013.


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