By: Gus Galante, MD

A few satire sites are making a big deal out of a small story that showed up a few weeks back about a woman whose implants deflated “after she went on a plane.” This isn’t the truth of what happened (here’s the link), but unfortunately that’s the spin a lot of reporters are taking on the story.

I can’t be more clear about this: breast implants aren’t affected by pressure changes in airline cabins.

Let’s look at the facts:

1. Even in the news story, the implant wasn’t the issue

In the news story that started this whole business, the woman discovered a pre-existing “slow leak” in her implant mainly because the changing cabin pressure sped up the leak and increased the swelling already happening in her breast tissues. This kind of rupture is pretty rare, and most of the time patients will “catch” it on their own, but in this woman’s case it was still the tissues around the implant – not the implant itself – that were affected by the pressure change.

2. Implants are designed to be resilient

Both saline and silicone-gel implants have a thick, soft outer layer made of flexible but durable silicone. This makes them very resistant to rupturing because of pressure changes, repeated movement, and nearly any other factor that could come their way. In general, breast implants in Indiana will be fine for years, even decades, unless the patient encounters something really dramatic like a car accident.

Over 300,000 women in the US received breast implants last year, and many millions more have had breast enhancement over the last decade. I guarantee you that a large percentage of these women have traveled by air, with virtually none of them experiencing anything out of the ordinary.