Recently, I wrote about Public Citizen’s letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration notifying the agency that two plastic surgery organizations’ webinar urged members to inaccurately downplay recent evidence about the risks of breast implant-related cancer when speaking to female patients.
“The communications were an attempt to trivialize the significance of the findings of increased numbers of cases of a rare form of cancer, called anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL), in women with breast implants,” Michael Carome, M.D., deputy director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said in a statement.
FDA has informed Public Citizen, a citizen advocacy organization, that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery plan to remove the information in question from their websites.
“Removal of the webinar from the plastic surgery organizations’ websites is an important first step in undoing the misleading and inaccurate ‘educational’ campaign initiated by these organizations,” said Jeffrey Shuren, M.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, in a letter to Public Citizen.
The FDA plans to work with the plastic surgery organizations and others knowledgeable about ALCL to develop a registry to gather additional information to better understand ALCL in women with breast implants, Shuren said.
