The leading cause of capsular contractures after a breast augmentation is the dentist.
The above comment should seem so obtuse as to help everyone reading this article to remember this. I was taught in medical school that the human mouth contains some very nasty bacteria, and if this bacteria gets into our system can lead to a very bad infection. Human bites, I was told, are much worse than most other animal bites because of our oral bacteria.
When you go for dental surgery, you often get blood in your mouth and therefore an opening for oral flora to enter your system. In following this logic, oral hygienic treatment leads to lots of blood in the mouth, and therefore potentially lots of bacteria into your system. This bacteria is read as an invader by your immune system which then releases a mass immunoglobulin IGM. This immunoglobulin leads to walling off the oral bacteria and any other foreign material in your body such as an artificial hip, a pacemaker, or your breast implants.
Therefore, dental visits can indirectly lead to hard breasts. One of my patients had a classic case of this several years ago. I saw her at 9 months after surgery and her breasts were soft and jiggly. She came back 2 months later with one hard breast, and the only variable that she or I could identify was that she went for teeth cleaning 2 weeks after her 9 month visit, and 6 weeks later she had a hard breast.
One way to avoid this problem is for the patient to take an antibiotic one hour before the dental visit, thereby eliminating oral bacteria prior to injury by the dentist or dental hygenist yielding a route of entry of this oral bacteria into our bodies.
In my practice at the Breast Implant Center of Hawaii, if one of my Honolulu breast augmentation patients get a capsular contracture caused by the dentist or other source, I place the patient with a capsular contracture on a regiment of leukotriene receptor antagonists for 90 days, and I have had excellent results. That is to say, I have been able to reverse the capsular contractures on multiple occasions.
