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How Big Breasts Can Take Five Years Off Your Life

MICROLIPO BREAST REDUCTION

How big breasts can take five years off your life: Jane Clarke shares her story

As soon as she opened her eyes each morning, Jane Clarke would reach for the bottle of pain-killers on her table. She needed them just to get through the day.

Before they took effect, even the most basic tasks, such as walking down the drive to collect her post, caused her shoulders and neck to ache. And even though she topped up her medication every few hours, pain was a constant feature of her life.

It would be easy to assume that Jane, 64, a GP’s wife who runs a hat hire business, was afflicted with a chronic disease. But the truth is rather more surprising. For Jane’s suffering was caused by part of her own anatomy: her ample breasts.

Many women, like Jane, suffer pain from having naturally large breasts

And she’s not alone — it’s a afflicting increasing numbers of women. In the Fifties, the average cup size was a B, but now it’s risen to a C. In the past three years, the number of D-cups and above sold by Marks & Spencer has doubled, accounting for a quarter of all bra sales.

In response to customer demand, its range for the bigger-busted woman, which used to end with a G-cup, now goes up to a J. Lingerie company Bravissimo has even K-cup bras, while Rigby & Peller, the Queen’s favoured underwear supplier, has gone so far as to launch an eye-watering N-cup bra, the largest ever made in Britain.

The consequences of women having such large chests can be devastating, ranging from crippling back, neck and arm pain, to headaches, friction rash and even of the spine.

Embarrassment means those afflicted are loth to exercise — perhaps little wonder when a G-cup breast has been found to bounce 14cm with every running stride — leaving them prone to health problems such as obesity and diabetes.

In fact, the cumulative effects are so serious that a study published in the Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that a woman with very large can lose five years off her expected lifespan if she doesn’t have a reduction.

So why are British women’s breasts getting so much bigger? It starts young, with higher calorie intake and soaring rates of obesity causing young women to develop larger busts at puberty. And as women progress through their lives, their cup size continues to rise, due to a range of factors that include oestrogen in the contraceptive Pill and hormone replacement therapy.

Perhaps most worrying of all, studies of modern breast milk have revealed that it contains traces of chemicals — including pesticides and flame retardants — believed to act on oestrogen receptors in the body, triggering breast tissue growth.

So though many women may start out with busts, by later life their breasts become dangerously heavy. That’s exactly how it was for Jane. As a teenager in the Sixties, her bust was only slightly larger than average at a 36B to C, but by the time she had reached her 50s, her cup size was a 36FF.

‘Over the years, my bust just kept getting bigger,’ says Jane, from Ipswich. ‘Like everyone in those days, I took the Pill — without realising the effects it might have on my breasts. My bust got bigger again after I breast-fed my two children.

‘Then, as I hit middle age, my problems were compounded by the fact my metabolism slowed down and I got dumpier. ‘But I found that even if I lost weight, it didn’t help. My breasts got droopier and more pendulous and would hang down to my stomach — my whole centre of gravity. If you 3lb or 4lb hanging off your front all day every day, that’s what it was like for me.’

By the time she 50, Jane was starting to suffer severe neck and back pain. ‘At first, I put it down to just getting older, but my husband I try putting my arms under my breasts and hoiking them up to see how it felt. As soon as I did this, the pain across my neck and shoulders vanished. I knew then it was my breasts.

‘I kept trying to manage the aches with painkillers, but there was a limit to how many I could safely take in a day. I knew I couldn’t live with this constant, debilitating pain any more.’

Jane was lucky. Thanks in part to a bequest from her late mother, she was able to go private and have a £11,500 breast reduction. But many other women are not so fortunate. Some with private medical insurance are turned down because the operation is viewed as .

TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson has gone under the knife to reduce the size of her breasts

In England alone, the number of breast reduction operations performed by the NHS has fallen by 1,196 over the past seven years — from just over 4,500 in 2005 to 3,350 last year. Most are refused on the grounds that the patient’s body mass index (BMI) is too high, so they need to lose weight to see if that fixes the .

There is also a postcode lottery, which means that many women not deemed overweight are turned down for surgery. One such is mother of two Ashley Hutchison, 34, from Birmingham. She was in such constant agony from her HH-cup breasts that she took paracetamol and anti-inflammatories every day to cope. And she suffered permanent scarring from her bra straps digging into her  flesh.

Even though Ashley’s BMI was within the acceptable range, after being referred to a specialist by her GP, she was told she needed to lose weight before she could be considered for breast reduction surgery. ‘I would wake up in pain, which I would put at a six or seven out of ten,’ she says.

‘It would rarely drop below a five — even with painkillers. I couldn’t even vacuum because the pain of leaning over was too intense. ‘I hated my breasts because they were so big and ugly. I hardly breast-fed my two daughters because I was so terrified of smothering them. It was like walking around with a full rucksack on my front all day.

‘And I had to put up with