Actress Soleil Moon Frye, who starred as a child in the sitcom Punky Brewster, reported in an interview with People magazine that boys taunted her, calling her "Hey, Punky Boobster!". It affected her professional and social life negatively. "People started to think of me as a bimbo", she said in the interview. "I couldnt sit up straight without people looking at me like I was a prostitute", Frye said.Finding large bra-sizes and styles that fit is challenging. Also, larger bras are more costly, challenging to find, and unflattering to the wearer. Ill-fitting bras with narrow straps can cause chronic irritation, redness, and indentations in the shoulders. Skin rashes under the breasts are common, particularly during warm weather. Heavy breasts may cause headaches, neck pain, upper and lower back pain, and numbness or tingling in the fingers. There is a possible connection between macromastia and carpal-tunnel-syndrome. Medical insurance coverage
Insurance companies in the United States typically require the physician to provide evidence that a womans large breasts cause headaches or back and neck pain before they will pay for reduction mammoplasty. Insurance companies also mandate a woman who is overweight, which is often the case with gigantomastia, to first lose a certain amount of weight. They also commonly require the patient to try alternative treatments like physical therapy for a year or more. Reported instances
Gigantomastia
One early and extreme case study of gigantomastia dates to 1670. The patient died four months after the onset of enlargement. One breast removed after the womans death weighed 29 kg (64 lb).
On April 17, 1848, a 42-year-old woman named Lu-shi was treated for hypertrophy in a Chinese hospital. She was treated by a missionary physician. On December 24, 1849, the left breast, measuring 67 cm (26.5 in) in circumference, and weighing 2.7 kg (6 lb), was removed in a procedure lasting three and a half minutes. The right breast was removed one month later. It measured 61 cm (24 in) in circumference and weighed 2.5 kg (5.5 lb).In 2005, a woman reported that her breasts grew at puberty from nothing to a C cup in one month. When she became pregnant for the first time, her breasts increased two cup sizes in a few days. Immediately after her first birth, her breasts grew three cup sizes. After her second child was born, her breasts increased six cup sizes. After her third childbirth, they grew 10 cup sizes, and after her fourth child was born, they grew nine cup sizes. In this instance, the swelling abated about 10 days after childbirth, but her bra cup size remained E to a G for the next year. About one year postpartum, her breasts rapidly atrophied to AA cup size.One of the most severe cases of macromastia was reported from Ilorin in Nigeria. In 2007, Dr Ganiyu Adebisi Rahman and his colleagues reported the case of a 26-year-old woman who presented with massive swelling of her breasts and bilateral axillary swellings of 6 years duration.