Breast Implant Choices

The Whole Beauty™ Institute offers four types of breast implants at our Chicago and Winnetka offices: saline (filled with saltwater), silicone gel, an anatomically-shaped implant that can be saline or silicone, and tissue expanders. Explore your options and consult with Dr. Cook to choose the type that is right for your body.

DR. JOHN Q. COOK: Today we are going to talk about the four different types of breast implants. Saline or salt water filled implants, silicon gel filled implants, another type of implant, which can be either saline or silicon gel that has a particular anatomic shape and finally tissue expanders, which are tremendously useful devices. Think of them like breast implants with a value so that we can then stretch tissue with them. We are going to start with the saline implants. As you can see the saline implant has a shell that is made of a material known as sylastic, which is the solid form of the silicon-polymer. It is tremendously useful material and we find it in a tremendous range of medical devices, not just breast implants. There is a value in the center of the device and basically we can place this when it’s collapsed into a tiny incision underneath the breast and then fill the implant with a tube that is connected to sterile salt water. And here you can see one of these implants when it’s filled with the salt water. It’s a very useful device. It does have some disadvantages, particularly in very thin patients. It will sometimes feel a little bit unnatural and sometimes it’s even a bit detectable. But they’re certainly very useful and we still find a wide range of applications for them. In the last couple of years more and more patients are opting for the silicon gel devices. These implants have a shell very similar to the saline devices but they are filled not with salt water but with an intermediate form of the silicon gel that has and almost consistency like jelly. And because of that they have a feel that’s much more like the natural breast. I think it’s this naturalness that has made them quite appealing to our patients and we’re finding both for breast reconstruction and for esthetic breast surgery that the majority of our patients at this point are choosing these devices. This is a special type of implant, which is known as the anatomical or shaped device. We can find these both in the silicone gel and the saline filled versions and basically they concentrate their volume in certain sections usually to give a greater degree of volume to the lower poll of the breast. This particular type of shape implant can sometimes be helpful in various specific situations. It may become quite a bit more useful if and when we receive approval from the United States to use the so-called high cohesive gel devices, which are currently in use in Europe and in other countries for breast reconstruction. So perhaps we will be seeing more of them in the future. The next device that I’d like to tell you about is a very special one. It’s known as a tissue expander. The tissue expander is like a breast implant but has a very special value with a metal backing in it and it’s tremendously well suited for breast reconstruction. Typically the way we use this device is that after the general surgeon performs a mastectomy we then come into the operating room and place this device underneath the pectoral muscle in the skin and I’ll put a small amount of salt water in at the time of the surgery but we don’t want to put too much because then it could be a bit uncomfortable. We let the patient recover from her surgery and usually two, three weeks later I begin the process of tissue expansion. For most patients they’ll come in once a week for a very short ten minute to the office and using a device that is essentially works like a stud finder I pass that back and forth, find the spot where the value is, mark that on the skin and then using a very tiny needle I can then access this value like so and inject the proper amount of salt water into this. Then basically with these repeat injections separate by a week or more, we gradually will increase the size of the tissue expander and bring the breast to the size and shape that we want. Now this is a device that is basically a preparation device. In other words it’s not the final reconstructive implant. That requires another very small operation just done on and outpatient basis where I make a very small incision through the original mastectomy incision. Take out the tissue expander and place one of these other two devices. I hope that this information has been very very helpful to you. I think it can sometimes be confusing to patients and actually seeing the devices I think really can help to get a better sense of these things. I want to thank you very much for visiting the Whole Beauty Institutes educational website.