Primary breast lymphoma in a patient with silicone breast implants: a case report and review of the literature

Note from Ilena Rosenthal and The Humantics Foundation:

www.BreastImplantAwareness.org/

We do not believe that this is as rare as the breast implant industry
wants people to believe. We have experience with several women from
our international Support Group who have suffered similarly. One woman
I know from my home town of San Diego had her lymphoma exactly where
her implant had ruptured.

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Primary breast lymphoma in a patient with silicone breast implants: a
case report and review of the literature.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...=pubmed_DocSum

J Plast Reconstr Aesthet Surg. 2007 May 15; [Epub ahead of
print]Primary breast lymphoma in a patient with silicone breast
implants: a case report and review of the literature.Newman MK, Zemmel
NJ, Bandak AZ, Kaplan BJ.

Division of Plastic Surgery, Virginia Commonwealth University Medical
Center, 1200 East Broad Street, P.O. Box 980154, Richmond, VA
23298-0154, USA.

Primary breast lymphoma is a rare disease. Estimated incidence is 72
to 910 cases per year. We report a patient who developed anaplastic
large cell lymphoma in her breast adjacent to a silicone breast
implant 14 years after elective breast augmentation. Metastatic work
up revealed no other focus of disease. She was treated with systemic
chemotherapy.

Review of the literature revealed five cases of primary breast
lymphoma associated with a breast implant. Patients presented with
either a mass or a periprosthetic fluid collection an average of eight
years after either silicone gel-filled or saline-filled breast implant
placement. Diagnosis was obtained with either biopsy or aspiration.

All patients had the same histological subtype, anaplastic large cell
lymphoma. It is unlikely that any cause-effect relationship exists
between breast implants and primary breast lymphoma since chance alone
could easily account for the low incidence of primary breast lymphoma
in patients with breast implants.

However, a fluid collection around a breast implant may be a unique
presentation for this population of patients.

Clinicians should include malignancy in the differential diagnosis of
periprosthetic fluid collections and periprosthetic masses. Useful
diagnostic tests may include MRI, aspiration with cytology, and
percutaneous or open biopsy.

PMID: 17509956 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]