26-year-old’s head burns during treatment at salon. Then doctors find damaged kidneys
Doctors are sounding the alarms after a woman from Tunisia fell ill following multiple hair-straightening treatments at a salon.
The 26-year-old woman arrived in a French doctors office for the first time in June 2020 when she was vomiting, had diarrhea, a fever and back pains, according to a March 21 case report published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The symptoms suggested a kidney infection, doctors said, and a test showed increased plasma creatinine levels. Plasma creatinine, a waste product that enters the blood from muscles, is typically filtered out by kidneys, so increased levels affirmed their suspicions.
Doctors performed a CT scan to take a closer look, but when they looked at the results they saw no obstructions or signs of infections, despite blood in her urine, according to the case report.
Her symptoms went away on their own, the doctors said, but then happened again two more times, once in April 2021 and again in July 2022.
When doctors asked about any environmental factors, she told them the symptoms began right after she went to a salon to undergo a chemical hair-straightening treatment.
She told doctors she experienced a “burning sensation” while her hair was being treated, and then had ulcers on her scalp in the days that followed, according to the case report.
The salon was using a cream treatment made with 10% glyoxylic acid, the doctors said.
A ‘safer alternative’
Hair-straightening treatments work by chemically changing the proteins in your hair to lose their shape for an extended period of time, Healthline reported.
For decades, these treatments have used formaldehyde as the primary chemical, which can release a toxic gas in the process.
Previous studies have linked formaldehyde treatments, commonly used in hair “relaxers,” to increased cancer risk, prompting warnings from health agencies to stop their use.
The findings led to multiple class-action lawsuits against companies like L’Oreal and Revlon that manufacture and sell the products.
“Glyoxylic acid was patented and introduced recently in hair-straightening products as a seemingly safer alternative to formulations containing formaldehyde,” the doctors said.
But even these aren’t without risks.
A 41-year-old woman became incredibly weak and nauseous following a formaldehyde-free chemical hair treatment, according to a 2022 case report published in the journal Case Reports in Nephrology and Dialysis.
She was hospitalized with serious kidney damage, one of only a few patients to report these symptoms since 2019, according to the case report.
Then, a case series from 2023 shared 26 patients across Israel who became ill and had kidney complications from keratin-based hair treatments, using a similar glycolic acid derivative, as published in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases.
Spotting the similarities, the doctors in France decided to test the chemical for themselves.
‘Discontinued from the market’
“To examine the potential mechanism, we applied the straightening product or control cream (petroleum jelly) to the backs of mice,” the doctors said in the NEJM case report.
When they performed tests on the mice kidneys the next day, doctors found the mice that had the treatment had increased plasma creatinine levels and crystals in their kidneys, similar to the 26-year-old woman, according to the report.
The mice were suffering from calcium oxalate-induced nephropathy, or large calcium deposits inside the kidneys that hinder their function, caused by the chemicals in the hair treatment.
“In consideration of the potential (kidney) toxicity of topical glyoxylic acid, products containing this compound should be avoided and, we would proffer, discontinued from the market,” the doctors said.
This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 11:01 AM with the headline "26-year-old’s head burns during treatment at salon. Then doctors find damaged kidneys."
