Aug. 10, 2007 -- Women have an overall threefold higher risk of suicide after getting breast implants -- a risk that keeps going up over time, a new study shows.

Loren Lipworth, ScD, Joseph K. McLaughlin, PhD, and colleagues analyzed data on 3,527 Swedish women. The women had voluntary cosmetic silicone breast-implant surgery an average of 19 years earlier.

"It appeared there was no excess risk of suicide in the first 10 years after receiving a breast implant," Lipworth tells WebMD. "But after that, the risk went up and continued to go up. There was a 4.5-fold risk for 10 years after surgery and a sixfold risk for 20 or more years."

The women also had a threefold higher risk of alcohol or drug dependence and an excess of drug/alcohol-related deaths from accident or injury.

Nobody is saying that silicon breast implants themselves make women commit suicide, although scientists cannot yet totally rule out that remote possibility, says Louise A. Brinton, PhD, MPH, chief of the hormonal and reproductive epidemiology branch of the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

"Probably this is not related to silicone toxicity, but we cannot entirely rule that out. It probably is more likely that it is an underlying psychological predisposition," Brinton tells WebMD.

Lipworth, along with every expert contacted by WebMD, agrees that the most likely explanation is that a small but substantial proportion of women seeking cosmetic breast implants have deep-seated psychological problems.

"What our data suggests to us is there is a subset of women choosing to get cosmetic breast implants who have psychiatric illness prior to implantation. This results in high risk of unnatural cause of death -- suicide and deaths related to alcohol dependence and drug abuse," says Lipworth, an assistant professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.

The findings appear in the August issue of Annals of Plastic Surgery.