28 janvier, 2003 19:04

Saturday, January 25, 2003

Health Canada has all the necessary data for its largest review to determine the cancer risks for women with silicone-gel breast implants, a Quebec doctor involved in the study said yesterday.

"The information is complete. Now we have to discuss the analysis," Jacques Brisson said in a phone interview from his office at St. Sacrement Hospital in Quebec City.

"It is very complex analyzing the statistics - especially in Quebec, where there are so many types of implants."

Most of the estimated 200,000 Canadian women who have received silicone implants, banned for aesthetic purposes since 1992, live in Quebec.

The Breast Implant Cohort Study, launched by Health Canada at the end of 1996, is to establish whether women with silicone prostheses are more susceptible to cancers other than breast cancer.

The cases of about 40,000 Quebec and Ontario women who received the gel-filled implants between 1974 and 1990 are being compared with a control group of about 20,000 other women who underwent elective cosmetic surgery that didn't involve the prostheses.

A Health Canada official said Thursday the cohort study's final report wasn't finished because the federal Laboratory Centre for Disease Control was still awaiting raw data from Statistics Canada.

Yesterday Martha Fair, a research section chief with Statistics Canada's occupational and environmental health division, said Brisson and his partners were sent "all the data we had for the study" last summer.

She said from Ottawa that Brisson was sent the mortality and cancer data for Quebec in August, while his fellow investigators in Ontario - Dr. Eric Holowaty, director of the Ontario Cancer Registry, and Dr. Yang Mao, chief of Health Canada's environment risk assessment and case surveillance division - received theirs in July.

"We're waiting for a signal from Dr. Mao (to convene a meeting), but nothing is scheduled yet," Brisson said.

A similar study in the U.S., Mortality Among Augmentation Mammoplasty Patients, based on a smaller group of 13,500 implant recipients, resulted in startling conclusions that were made public in 2001.

Conducted by the National Cancer Institute, the study found that women with silicone implants were three times more likely to die of respiratory tract cancer and two to three times more likely to die of brain cancer.

In July 1998, former implant maker Dow Corning reached a $50-million out-of-court settlement with 10,000 Quebec and Ontario women. Baxter Healthcare Corp., another manufacturer, agreed five months earlier to pay $22 million to 3,000 women in both provinces.