Total and cause specific mortality among Swedish women with cosmetic breast implants: prospective study
BMJ 2003; 326 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.326.7388.527 (Published 08 March 2003) Cite this as: BMJ 2003;326:527
- V C M Koot, clinician (kuckkoot@ikmn.nl)a,
- P H M Peeters, associate professora,
- F Granath, associate professorb,
- D E Grobbee, professora,
- O Nyren, professorb
- a Julius Centre for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Centre, Box 85500, 3508 GA Utrecht, Netherlands
- b Department of Medical Epidemiology, Karolinska Institute, Box 281, S-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden
- Correspondence to: V C M Kuck-Koot, Comprehensive Cancer Centre Middle Netherlands, PO Box 19079, 3501 DB Utrecht, Netherlands
- Accepted 17 January 2003
The potential health hazards of breast implants have been heavily debated for the past decade, yet only one study has reported on long term mortality among women with such implants, and around one fifth of the participants were lost to follow up. 1 2 We assessed total and cause specific mortality among Swedish women who underwent augmentation mammoplasty between 1965 and 1993. As a desire for cosmetic surgery represents underlying psychopathology in some patients, we hypothesised that deaths due to suicide may be over-represented.3
Subjects and methods
Details about accrual of the cohort have been given elsewhere.4 We obtained records from the Swedish Inpatient Register of all 15–69 year old women who had had breast implants (n=7585) in 1965-93. We identified records with erroneous registration numbers or where emigration or death occurred before surgery through linkages with registers held by Statistics Sweden, using the unique national registration numbers. We excluded such records and records where surgery occurred …