Hair Dyes

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Anchor lead: If you use permanent hair dyes you may want to rethink this practice, Elizabeth Tracey reports

The Sisters study is following women who’ve had a sister with breast cancer, and right now almost 50,000 women are taking part. A recent analysis shows that those women who use hair dyes may be increasing their risk for breast cancer. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, describes the results.

Nelson: They found that these women in this study were about 9% more likely to develop breast cancer. When you looked at African American women if they used some kind of hair dye, straightening product every five to eight weeks there was a sixty percent increase in breast cancer. Caucasian women who did the same thing kind of practices only had their breast cancer risk go up about 8 percent or so. This was pretty much restricted to the permanent hair coloring, hair dye kind of treatments, not so much with the temporary products.  :32

Nelson says while this research continues, a switch to temporary hair colors is one option. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.