Tag Archives: implants

FDA Warns Allergan Over Breast Implant Studies

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Sasha Chavkin, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: May 19, 2020

United States health authorities issued a warning letter to leading global breast implant manufacturer Allergan for failing to properly carry out post-market safety studies.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration found that Allergan did not meet its standards for recruiting and following up with participants in studies that included several styles of implants withdrawn from sale worldwide last year due to cancer risks.

Another company, Ideal Implant Incorporated, was rebuked for failing to properly track complaints by customers or take adequate corrective actions for problems identified during a site inspection.

“The FDA will continue to hold manufacturers accountable if they fail to fulfill their obligations,” Dr. Binita Ashar of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health said in an agency statement announcing the warning letters.

In November 2018, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that thousands of women around the world were suffering from serious illnesses after receiving breast implants, a finding that was part of its global Implant Files investigation.

In the months after the Implant Files’ publication, regulators around the world took action to better protect patients. Authorities in France, Canada, and the United States announced bans on Allergan Biocell implants, which were associated with increased risk of a rare form of cancer.

The moves prompted Allergan to announce a global recall of Biocell products last July. (Earlier this month, Allergan was acquired by global pharmaceutical giant AbbVie.)

The recalled implants are among the ones that Allergan was failing to properly study, the FDA found. The agency noted that the studies were crucial to identifying the risks for patients already implanted with Biocells.

“Post-approval studies are especially important to inform our understanding of the long-term potential risks associated with Allergan’s implants, including the models that have since been recalled from the market,” Ashar said in the FDA’s statement.

The agency touted the warning letters as a part of its “ongoing efforts” to better protect breast implant patients, also citing its Medical Device Safety Action Plan and the development of a National Breast Implant Registry to collect data on breast implant safety.

But Dr. Diana Zuckerman, the director of the National Center for Health Research, a health policy think tank, said the agency must also be willing to take tough measures against companies that fail to follow its rules.

Zuckerman noted that breast implant makers have a history of poor compliance with safety studies mandated by the FDA, which approved silicone breast implants for the U.S. market in 2006 despite scant data on their long-term safety.

Instead, the agency allowed manufacturers Allergan and Mentor to conduct long-term safety studies after their products were already on the market. Within three years, Allergan and Mentor lost touch with 40% and 80% of the patients, respectively, in key sections of these post-approval studies, torpedoing the FDA’s demand that they collect reliable long-term data.

Nonetheless, the agency permitted the implants to remain on the market.

Zuckerman was skeptical that the warning letters would have much effect unless the FDA showed it was willing to take products that violated its rules for safety studies off the market.

“It absolutely should be possible to take off the ones that aren’t studied properly,” Zuckerman said. “I guarantee if they did that the ones that are still on the market would finish their studies.”

Read the full article here. 

‘They killed her’: Why are breast implants still putting millions of women at risk?

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Maria Aspan, Fortune: May 18, 2020

Thirty-three years before her death, Paulette Parr visited her doctor for a popular and relatively routine procedure. It was 1986, and Parr was 35, working in human resources at the local hospital in Sikeston, a 16,000-person Missouri enclave midway between St. Louis and Memphis. A married mother of two young boys, she was interested in what plastic surgeons still call a “mommy makeover,” a catchall for the various procedures that nip, tuck, and lift women back to a pre-childbirth shape. For Parr, that meant getting her first set of breast implants.

For the next 15 years, through losing her first husband and remarrying and getting promoted to her hospital’s purchasing department, Parr was mostly happy with her implants, and with how they made her look and feel. But they were silicone-based, a type the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned in 1992 over concerns that they were causing autoimmune and safety problems, and Parr eventually started to worry about them. So by 2002, when she learned that one of her implants had ruptured and was leaking silicone into her body, Parr’s surgeon replaced them with saline-filled versions. Her new Biocell implants were covered in a roughly textured silicone shell, designed to reduce movement of the device.

That’s when Parr’s implant-related health problems really began, according to a lawsuit her husband has filed against pharmaceutical company Allergan, the maker of Biocell products and one of three major manufacturers of American breast implants. In 2010, after one of her saline implants started leaking, her plastic surgeon replaced them with yet another set of Biocell textured implants, this time filled with silicone, which the FDA had allowed back onto the market in 2006.

“They were gorgeous, and they were put in by a reputable doctor,” says Paulette’s widower, Calvin Parr, months after her death. “We never gave it a second thought.”

Breast implants have long been a punch line, mocked as frivolous markers of female vanity. But that dismissive attitude overlooks a business with a serious and sometimes deadly impact on the health of its overwhelmingly female customer base. More than 8 million American women have undergone breast-related plastic surgeries since 2000; in 2018 alone, more than 400,000 women chose one for either cosmetic or reconstructive reasons. Breast augmentation is the most popular cosmetic procedure tracked by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

Many women, especially those affected by breast cancer, say they are grateful to have implants as an option. “It’s a decision that’s personal,” says Lynn Jeffers, the society’s current president, a plastic surgeon, and a cancer survivor who’s getting post-mastectomy reconstruction. “With the data that I have now, I’m comfortable having implants.”

And pharmaceutical companies have been very comfortable selling them, despite a long history of government recalls and product-liability lawsuits. Allergan, which was acquired by AbbVie in May, sold $399.5 million worth of implants in 2017, before regulators around the globe started banning some of its products. Its main rival, Johnson & Johnson, doesn’t break out results for its Mentor Worldwide breast implant business. Smaller specialist Sientra reported annual “breast products” revenues of $46.4 million in 2019.

Those numbers pale in comparison to blockbusters like Allergan bestseller Botox, which raked in $3.8 billion last year. But like Botox, breast implants can have attractive recurring revenue built in for manufacturers and the doctors who use their products. Even under ideal circumstances, breast implants “are not lifetime devices,” the FDA warns, and will likely need to be replaced every 10 to 15 years, for a cost of up to $12,000 per cosmetic procedure.

Yet as doctors, patients, lawyers, and public health experts tell Fortune, breast implants have remained on the market despite decades of inadequate testing and study, recurrent safety concerns, and poor regulatory oversight. Those problems plague many medical devices, which range from machines used outside the body to artificial parts implanted within it. But breast implants are unique in their affiliation with female sexuality and physical appearance, their intersecting roles as elective beauty products and clinical tools that can help cancer survivors feel more like themselves—and the degree to which patients’ mounting concerns about them have been dismissed for decades. Now, that accumulated failure of oversight has created sweeping, sometimes tragic crises for potentially millions of women.

“There are a lot of women who are really suffering,” says Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research. “You have these products that are widely, widely sold, and every few years we learn something new about the problems they cause.”

Breast implant makers walk a particularly fine line when it comes to creating a product that is both safe and “realistic.” Today’s implants are either filled with saline (more likely to break) or silicone (more natural looking and feeling but plagued by a history of safety concerns). Their exteriors can be either smooth or made of a “textured” silicone shell. Smooth implants are more popular in the U.S., but surgeons working with mastectomy patients sometimes prefer textured versions, because the products’ rougher surface enables tissue to grow onto the implant more easily.

All of these variations are prone to malfunctions or side effects, which can include ruptured implants; a buildup of scar tissue that can cause pain and tissue hardening; a large collection of symptoms often known as “breast implant illness,” which can include joint pain, migraines, and chronic fatigue; and, increasingly, a sometimes fatal cancer of the immune system known as ­BIA-ALCL, for “breast implant–­associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma.”

“The breast implants that are on the market right now all have issues,” says Madris Tomes, a former FDA manager who tracks reported medical device failures at her Device Events firm. “I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone that I care about.”

The causes of the various problems with breast implants are still poorly understood, which public health experts blame on a lack of testing or objective, long-term studies that do not rely on manufacturer-provided data or funding. Device makers also have yet to fully report the data the FDA required as a condition of allowing silicone implants back on the market in 2006.

[…]

Read the full article here. 

FDA Challenged Over Metal Implants ‘Public Health Travesty’

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Sasha Chavkin, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: November 14, 2019

Patients who suffered debilitating immune reactions after being implanted with metal-containing devices have joined doctors, scientists and industry representatives to testify before a United States government advisory panel probing the risks of immunological responses to metals placed inside the body.

The hearing represented the most systematic look by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at the issue of adverse reactions to metals, a problem that affects a minority of implant patients but one that can cause severe pain, neurological damage and cognitive impairments.

“I’m in a great deal of pain, so please bear with me,” testified Sue Francis, a hip implant patient who has experienced severe health effects stemming from her reaction to metal. “We need to recognize that these metals from day one are interacting with our bodies.”

Metals are a major component of common devices such as artificial hips, spinal fusion implants and the contraceptive coil Essure, but there is limited scientific research on auto-immune and allergic responses to them.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported extensively on hip implants and Essure as part of its global Implant Files investigation, which revealed massive gaps in medical device oversight that left patients vulnerable to flawed and poorly tested products.

Patients and their advocates urged the FDA to order more detailed disclosure of the metals used in devices, to require device labels to disclose the risks associated with metals, and to send a letter to doctors across the country alerting them to the threat of adverse metal reactions.

[…]

Unlike hearings earlier this year on breast implants and vaginal mesh that focused on specific products and regulatory steps, yesterday’s hearing focused on trying to understand and improve the state of scientific knowledge on metal reactions.

As such, it is unlikely to result in the short term in dramatic steps such as banning products from the market.

Experts urged the FDA to make the hearing the beginning of a sustained effort to gather data on the problem of metal reactions, including their differential effects among patients of different gender, age and socioeconomic status.

For example, the substantial majority of adverse responses to metal devices occur among women, who are generally more vulnerable to auto-immune, rheumatic and thyroid disorders.

“There’s a need for more and better pre-market research,” said Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Center for Health Research. “We need to really have better data on diversity of patients.”

Read the original article here.

FDA Advisers Hear About Problems, Research Needs With Metal Implants

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Mary Jo M. Dales, MedPage Today: November 14. 2019

Reports of adverse events related to metal-containing implants are on the rise. While still rare on a proportional basis, the numbers are increasing as the sheer volume of surgical implants has expanded, an FDA advisory committee was told Wednesday.

At the first day of a two-day meeting of the Immunology Devices Panel of the Medical Devices Advisory Committee, members heard from experts that it isn’t easy to tease out which patients are likely to have an adverse event. While patients with a known metal allergy might be an obvious risk group, the ability to screen for these allergies is limited.

And while these devices each have a unique identifier, the metallic components within individual devices are seldom detailed in this labelling further limiting the patient’s ability to avoid a known metal allergy, based on public testimony given during the meeting. Over 50 registered speakers were granted speaking time at the two-day meeting.

In a discussion of an array of histologic, imaging, and serologic studies that might be useful for selected out patients at risk for metal-related adverse events, experts pointed out that these measures alone fell short. Abnormal test results do not reliably predict adverse events. Further, the combinations of tests that might be indicative would be prohibitively expensive to perform on a large population of patients to determine a small sub-population at risk.

As device implantation has grown in recent years, so have problems tied to them. In 2012, for instance, the FDA held a two-day advisory committee meeting to address failure rates and adverse effects from metal-on-metal hip implants. That led the agency a few months later to put restrictions on these products. Still, issues remain around management of patients who received them. And that’s just one type of metallic implant, of which there are hundreds if not thousands.

Earlier in 2019, the FDA announced efforts to further evaluate the safety of specific materials used in medical devices and how to better identify patients who might be at increased risk of experiencing a hypersensitivity response. The agency is accepting public comment on the issue until December 16.

[…]

In public testimony Wednesday, Karin Pacheco, MD, MSPH, an allergist at National Jewish Health and the University of Colorado in Denver, presented data on 1,500 patients with unexplained joint failure referred by their orthopedic surgeons who have ruled out infections and mechanical issues. The findings indicate that half of these patients are sensitized to something in the joint — about a quarter of them to the relevant metal in their implant, about 20% to bone cement, and a smaller proportion to both components.

Further, people with allergies and revised to another implant with different components do “extremely well,” she said. The implications are that sensitization to implant components is a cause of joint failure. “We think that nickel, cobalt and chromium, and maybe titanium, are the culprits, but we need more research.”

“If you have a history of skin reactivity [to device components], then you probably need to be tested” before receiving an implant, she said. Pacheco emphasized that over a million joint replacements are done each year in the U.S. and more of them are going to people ages 45-64.

Diana Zuckerman, PhD, president of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research, urged comparative effectiveness research.

“If certain implants seem to be causing certain reactions with certain kinds of patients, wouldn’t it be very important to know how that compares to other alternatives of the same kind of implants? We can’t treat all hip implants that are polyethylene and metal as if they’re all the same,” she said.

“We can’t treat all metal-on-metal implants as if they’re the same. We need to compare different models, different implants made in different ways with different materials by different companies and get some kind of real data” that patients and physicians can use to make informed decisions, Zuckerman added. Until then, figuring out how much is due to patient vulnerabilities and how much is the difference between various devices will remain challenging.

Several speakers detailed their personal experiences of adverse events, including neurologic and rheumatologic events that followed their receiving an implant. Linda Radach said she received a metal-on-metal hip implant requiring two subsequent revision surgeries, concluding, “The bottom line between all the harm is the materials. Go after that. Set rigid standards for biocompatibility testing.”

[…]

The Immunology Devices Panel will hear additional comments on Thursday, especially in regard to dental amalgam, and will respond to a series of questions posed by FDA staff.

Read the original story here.

How the FDA Handles Recalls of Life-Saving Implants Could Put People at Risk, Patients Say

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Nicole Carr, WSBTV; May 20, 2019


Jonesboro resident Geraldine Robinson is one of millions of Americans who use an implanted medical device to improve, and possibly extend her life.

In 2013 she was implanted with a defibrillator to help with her congestive heart failure. She went to the doctor for checkups every six months. Robinson thought her device would keep her healthy for years. But last month the hospital called to tell her that device’s battery was failing. Robinson rushed to the emergency room.

“I was scared they wasn’t going to get to me in time,” Geraldine said.

The next day doctors replaced her device. The reason for the surgery noted on her patient information card was, recall.

Channel 2’s Nicole Carr searched the FDA recall database and found Robinson’s device had been recalled two years earlier. The manufacturer’s suggested course of action was to monitor the device.

While Robinson said she had no idea her device was recalled, her hospital said she was mailed a letter to notify her. Robinson said she never got that letter.

Diana Zuckerman, president of The National Center for Health Research, said she wasn’t surprised that Robinson’s recalled device remained implanted for years.

“This is the doctor having to say to the patient, ‘This implant in your body has been recalled but we don’t think you should have it removed unless you’re having obvious problems with it,” Zuckerman said.

Zuckerman was also said Robinson is most likely not alone in her confusion, and often patients don’t learn their device is recalled.

“Perhaps the patient has moved and the doctor or even the hospital doesn’t know where that patient is anymore,” Zuckerman said.

Linda Radach, an implant recipient herself, said she believes the recall process needs an overhaul.

“The FDA is very, very slow to use their authority to issue a recall instead requiring warning letters and requiring post market surveillance studies. Most of which are never completed,” Radach said.

According the FDA website they hardly every issue a recall, instead trusting manufacturers to self-report. An FDA spokeswoman said recalls are not the only way they get dangerous products off the market.

There are several patient resources available for medical device recipients, including questions to ask your doctor about the approval process.

Radach said a 2006 metal on metal hip replacement failed leaving dangerous cobalt chromium debris in her system.

“I’ve now had six total hip replacements,” Radach said. She said her issues were never reported to the FDA by her doctors and her device was never recalled. She did her own research and found her device had been approved for market three years after it was put in her body. “That alarmed me enough to realize this was much, much bigger than just me.”

Radach told Channel 2 Action News many of the parts that made up her implant were cleared through the 510k process which rarely requires clinical trials on human patients. The process has been in place since 1976.

Zuckerman said the 501K process it’s not enough.

“All those companies have to do is prove that their new device is substantially equivalent to a device that’s already on the market,” Zuckerman said.

In 2011 Zuckerman co-authored a report that found from 2005 until 2009, 113 recalls were class one. Only 21 of those recalls went through clinical trials. She said things haven’t improved.

“Instead of saying ‘let’s be more stringent and require clinical trials for more implants,’ they’re doing exactly the opposite,” Zuckerman said. […]

See the original story here.