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Hair
Dye Use Doesn't
Up Breast Cancer Risk
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) -
Women who color their hair do not appear to increase their breast
cancer risk, according to the results of a new study.
"We found no overall association between hair dye use and breast
cancer risk based on detailed information regarding lifetime use
of hair dye products," write Tongzhang Zheng of Yale University
in New Haven, Connecticut, and colleagues.
Hair-coloring products
are known to contain both mutagenic--meaning they can induce mutations
in a cell's DNA--and carcinogenic compounds. But studies searching
for a link between hair dye use and breast cancer have had mixed
results, the researchers note in the September issue of the European
Journal of Cancer.
To investigate, Zheng's
team evaluated the hair coloring practices of 608 women who had
been diagnosed and treated for breast cancer and compared them
with a group of 609 similarly aged healthy women.
The researchers found
no association between use of permanent or temporary hair-coloring
products and breast cancer. While there was a slightly increased
breast cancer risk among women who used semi-permanent hair-coloring
products, this finding could have been due to chance because it
did not reach statistical significance. And risk did not increase
if a woman used such products more frequently or for a longer
time, or had started using them earlier in life.
"We also did not find
an association between hair dye use and risk of breast cancer
based on an individual's reason for using a hair-coloring product
as suggested by (other research findings)," the investigators
add. For example, whether a woman colored her hair to change her
natural color or to cover up gray did not have an impact on risk.
"These observations,
together with the majority of the earlier studies, suggest that
personal hair-coloring product use is unlikely to be a major cause
of human breast cancer," Zheng and colleagues conclude.
SOURCE: European Journal
of Cancer 2002;38:1647-1652.
Reference
Source 89
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