Hair straightening linked to increased risk of uterine cancer 3:51
(CNN) --
Scientists have uncovered new details about the connection between the use of certain hair straightening products, such as chemical relaxers and flat irons, and an increased risk of cancer in women.
Ongoing research suggests that chemical hair-straightening products are associated with an increased risk of certain hormone-related cancers, such as breast and ovarian cancers, and now a new study links the use of hair-straightening products hair with an increased risk of uterine cancer.
The researchers note that black women may be more affected by the increased use of these products.
A new study links the use of chemicals to straighten hair with certain types of cancer.
The study, published Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, estimates that among women who did not use chemical hair straightening products in the past 12 months, 1.6% developed uterine cancer by age 70. But about 4% of women who frequently use these hair-straightening products developed uterine cancer by age 70.
This finding "also communicates that uterine cancer is really rare. However, the fact that the risk is doubled is cause for some concern," says Chandra Jackson, study author and researcher at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences .
"In this study, women with frequent use in the past year had a more than twofold increased risk of uterine cancer," he said.
Frequent use was defined as more than four times in the previous year.
Cancer risk was more pronounced in black women
The new study includes data from nearly 34,000 women in the United States, ages 35 to 74, who filled out questionnaires about their use of certain hair products, such as perms, dyes, wave relaxers and straighteners.
The researchers, from the National Institutes of Health, also tracked the incidence of cancer diagnoses within the study group.
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Researchers found a strong association between hair-straightening products and uterine cancer, but use of other hair products, such as hair dyes and perms or wave products, was not associated with uterine cancer .
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The study data also showed that the association between hair straightening products and uterine cancer was more pronounced for black women, who made up only 7.4% of study participants , but 59.9% of those who declared having used straightening products at some time.
Several factors are likely to influence the frequent use of hair straightening products: Eurocentric beauty standards, social pressures placed on Black and Latina women in the workplace regarding microaggressions, and the threat of discrimination, along with with the desired versatility to change hairstyles and express yourself.
"The bottom line is that exposure appears to be higher among black women," Jackson said.
"Based on the body of literature in this area, we know that hair products marketed directly to children and Black women have been shown to contain multiple chemicals associated with disrupting hormones, and these products marketed to Black women have also been shown to have harsher chemical formulations," he said.
"In addition, we know that black women tend to use multiple products simultaneously, which may contribute to their having higher concentrations of these hormone-disrupting chemicals in their bodies on average."
The researchers did not collect information on the brands or ingredients of hair products used by the women, but they wrote in the paper that several chemicals identified in chemical straightening products could contribute to the higher incidence of uterine cancer seen in their study .
"To our knowledge, this is the first epidemiological study to examine the relationship between the use of hair straightening products and uterine cancer," said Alexandra White, group leader of the Environmental and Cancer Epidemiology group at the National Institute of Cancer. of Environmental Health Sciences and lead author of the study, in a press release Monday.
"Further research is needed to confirm these findings in different populations, to determine whether hair products contribute to health disparities in uterine cancer, and to identify specific chemicals that may be increasing the risk of cancers in the uterus." women".
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A new and growing area of research
Some substances in hair-straightening products, especially those most widely used and marketed by Black and Latina women, are hormone-disrupting chemicals, says Tamarra James-Todd, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who was not involved in the new study, but who has separately led some of the first research to find links between hair products and cancer.
"They change normal hormonal processes in our body. So it makes sense to study cancers that are mediated by hormones," he said, adding that hormone-disrupting chemicals could affect other parts of the body as well.
"The challenge is that the impact of these chemicals might not be limited to hormonal processes, but could also affect other systems, such as the immune and vascular systems. Understanding how these chemicals act beyond the hormonal system is still a challenging area." of new and growing research," James-Todd told CNN.
"So it could be that the way these chemicals are operating is through altering not only hormonal responses, but also through altering immune or even vascular responses," he said.
"All of these processes are related to cancer."
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Although the new study is "well done" and shows an association between hair-straightening chemicals and an increased risk of uterine cancer, it cannot determine that the products directly cause cancer, Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and former medical director of the American Cancer Society.
"You can't prove cause, it could just be association," said Brawley, who was not involved in the new study.
However, "the question of how to solve this is difficult. The ideal from a scientific point of view is to do a randomized trial with 40,000 people, more or less; 20,000 with regular use of hair straightening chemicals and 20,000 who never have used them and follow them for 20 years," he said, adding that, at this point, "there's no way the science can answer better than" the recent study.
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