Reality Survivor Jenny Lyon Dies of Breast Cancer Masked by Implants

Jennifer Lyon, a contestant on the US realtiy show Survivor: Palau, died this week at home from breast cancer.  She was 37.

Lyon told People magazine, "In the summer of 2004, I felt something in my right breast that didn't feel normal.  I thought it was probably scar tissue related to my breast implants. So I let it go – for a long time."  Lyon was subsequently diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, and had a modified bilateral mastectomy with chemotherapy and tamoxifen. 

As I read of her death, my immediate question was: are women who have cosmetic breast implants more likely to have a delayed diagnosis of breast cancer than women who do not have implants?

The short answer to this question is yes: implants hinder the diagnosis of breast cancer.  But the rest of the answer is: but this delayed diagnosis does not appear to worsen risk of death. 

Xie et al performed a cohort study of almost 25,000 women who had bilateral breast implants in Canada, and compared them to nearly 16,000 women who had other cosmetic surgical procedures.  Incident cancers were identified, and compared between the two groups.  While the two groups did not differ in tumor size, age at diagnosis, or cell type, they did differ in tumor stage: women who had implants were more likely to be diagosed at a later stage of cancer, often when the cancer had spread. 

Although this next bit is not intuitive, readers following the mammography controversy will not be surprised: although the women with breast implants had cancers diagnosed at a later stage, this did not lead to an increase death rate from breast cancer. 

In study of over 6,000 Swedish and Danish women who had cosmetic implants, Lipworth et al found no increase risk of any type of cancer except lung cancer; this was chalked up to higher rates of smoking among women who had implants. 

While women who get cosmetic breast implants are no more likely to develop most kinds of cancer than the average woman, they are about 30% more likely to die by suicide, according to a separate study by Lipworth et al.

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DrBaxter
Posts: 1

breast cancer detection and implants
Reply #1 on : Thu January 21, 2010, 16:13:05

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The question of delayed diagnosis related to breast implants has been extensively examined. Deapen from USC in a review article in 2007 stated "these patients do not experience delayed detection or poorer post-breast cancer survival." In this unfortunate case it was not the implants but ignoring a lump that contributed to the delayed diagnosis.

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