Prevalence of Local Postoperative Complications and Breast Implant Illness in Women With Breast Implants

IMPORTANCE It is unknown how often breast implant illness (BII) is the indication for revision in women with silicone breast implants. OBJECTIVE To examine how often women with silicone breast implants have their implants explanted or replaced because of BII compared with local postoperative complications. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A legacy cohort study on breast implant revision surgery was conducted between April 1, 2015, and December 31, 2020, and a prospective cohort study on breast implantation and revision surgery was conducted between April 1, 2015, and December 31, 2019 (with follow-up until December 31, 2020). Data were obtained from the Dutch Breast Implant Registry. Data analysis was performed from September 2021 to August 2022. EXPOSURES Silicone breast implant. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Breast implant revision with the indication BII or local postoperative complications. RESULTS All 12 882 cosmetic breast implants (6667 women; mean [SD] age, 50.6 [12.7] years) and 2945 reconstructive breast implants (2139 women, mean [SD] age, 57.9 [11.3] years) in the legacy cohort and all 47 564 cosmetic breast implants (24120 women, mean [SD] age, 32.3 [9.7] years) and 5928 reconstructive breast implants (4688 women, mean [SD] age, 50.9 [11.5] years) in the prospective cohort were included for analysis. In the prospective cohort, 739 cosmetic breast implants (1.6%) were revised after a median (IQR)time to reoperation of 1.8 (0.9-3.1) years, and 697 reconstructive breast implants (11.8%) were revised after a median (IQR) time to reoperation of 1.1 (0.5-1.9) years. BII was registered as the reason for revision in 35 cosmetic revisions (4.7%) and 5 reconstructive revisions (0.7%) in the prospective cohort, corresponding to 0.1% of the inserted implants. In the legacy cohort, 536 cosmetic revisions (4.2%) and 80 reconstructive breast implant revisions (2.7%) were performed because of BII. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this cohort study of women with silicone breast implants, BII was an uncommon indication for revision compared with local complications, both in the short and long term. In contrast to the increasing public interest in BII, these results showed that local complications are a far more common reason for breast implant revision.