• Video
  • Breast Implant Risks: What Could Happen and How to Prevent Mistakes
{{ showTranscript ? 'HIDE' : 'SHOW' }} TRANSCRIPT
Breast implant surgery normally goes very smoothly for patients. Most patients have an awesome experience, but there are some things that can go wrong after surgery. In the immediate post-op period, patients are more familiar with those types of complications like bleeding and infection. It's really the long-term complications that many patients aren't aware of.

Capsular contracture can happen and that's abnormal scar tissue forming around the implant. You can get a very high tight look, kind of grape fruits glued to the chest that can sometimes happen with capsular contracture.

Also if too large an implant is chosen, the implant can descend below the normal fold of the breast. That leads to a deformity called double bubble where you see the bottom of the breast and then you see another bubble where the bottom of the implant is.

There can also be complications like symmastia where the normal separation between the breasts is violated. So the breast actually have no normal separation. I heard a story about one patient who could actually transpose her implants from side to side and flip flop them because there was no normal separation.

Patients don't often realize these can happen and it's important to pick a surgeon who, not only will do things safely the first time to prevent these, but someone who could also potentially manage them if they happen.

Revision surgery, I think patients need to understand it's much more complicated than a first-time breast aug. If you had a 45-minute surgery for your original augmentation, it could take up to three hours to fix a complication from that surgery. One of the best forms we have to help fix things like that is the artificial dermal matrices that are out or slings. They're also called allografts. They can really help rebuild anatomic boundaries that have been lost. They can help thicken the tissues to cover issues like rippling or stretch and sag in the lower pole. So that is really revolutionized the way we do revision breast surgery.

Breast Implant Risks: What Could Happen and How to Prevent Mistakes

Dr. Dana M. Goldberg discusses possible risks and complications associated with breast augmentation and how to minimize these risks.