Breast implants laced with metal – does that seem like an object out of the pages of your sci-fi comic book? Well this may have been fiction till a few years back, but metal in breast implants are the new objects on the block. Breast implants laced with metal will be implanted in thousands of Australian women in a first-of-its-kind trial aimed at reducing cases of breast job hardening and deformity.

Breast implant surgery is one of the most popular cosmetic surgeries and every year more than 10,000 Australian women go in for this surgery.  However, about seven per cent of these women suffer from an unnatural tightening where the breast becomes overly firm, and sometimes distorted and painful. Known as capsular contraction, this complication arises when breast tissue surrounding the breast implants react by contracting and squashing the implant, making it hard and scrunching up the breast.

\'Capsular contracture is a significant problem in the industry and it\'s one we\'ve had difficulty solving so it\'s exciting to try to find new ways to avoid it,\' said Dr Daniel Fleming, the study leader of this project who will soon become president of the Australasian College of Cosmetic Surgery.

Cosmetic surgeons have started to recruit 3000 Australian women nationwide to test out a European-made titanium implant they believe will have lower rates of so-called capsular conjecture.

A French implant company has tried to negate the problem by modifying their standard silicone gel implants and coating them in an invisible, microscopic layer of titanium, a naturally-occurring metal also used in hip replacements and bone screws. The idea behind this is that when a titanium implant is inserted inside the patient’s body, the body sees the titanium and not silicone, and it won’t react.

Only time will tell, if the titanium experiment is going to solve the problem of capsular contraction.