3rd Hour Today: Hair Care Cancer Concerns: Study Links Dye & Straighteners to Breast Cancer Risk

NBC ID: MAAAABJM2U | Production Unit: Today Show | Media Type: Aired Show | Air Date(s): 12/04/2019 | Event Date(s): 12/04/2019

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Event Date(s): 12/04/2019 | Event Location(s): Today New York Studio | Description: INT TODAY NEW YORK STUDIO Live in studio 1A, Roker, Melvin, Jones and Dreyer are joined by NBC News Medical Contributor Dr. Natalie Azar In studio x-talk: SHEINELLE JONES (09:15:40): Welcome back. We want to talk about a new study, it was just released yesterday from the International Journal of Cancer. It found that women who use permanent hair dye of chemical straighteners, which is, I don’t know, pretty much everybody I know, had a possible higher risk of developing breast cancer. So when you hear the stats, it is so alarming. Listen to this. The new study found that nine percent of women who use hair dye and eighteen percent of women who use chemical straighteners are more likely to develop breast cancer than women who don’t. White women who use a permanent hair dye had a seven percent risk of breast cancer, compared to black women who had a forty-five percent risk. CRAIG MELVIN (09:16:13): Wow. SHEINELLE JONES (09:16:13): So everybody is buzzing about this story. This morning we asked Doctor Natalie Azar to come in because the reality is, do you give up your hair dye, do you get-- you know, how many women say, no, I don’t want to go gray yet. And they just-- are you kidding? DR. NATALIE AZAR (NBC News Medical Contributor) (09:16:24): I know. No, and I don’t think any expert is saying no, you-- everyone has to stop using their hair dye immediately. In fact, you know, the experts that I reached out to basically had a sort of uniform response to this. This is a very important study. This is intriguing, this is compelling. This is building on prior research. Some of which did show an association, some of which didn’t show an association. So it’s been inconclusive and inconsistent. If you’re one of those people who says, you know-- and you personally and you partner with your doctor, and you say, I’m at significantly higher risk because of X, Y and Z and I want to mitigate, and erase every possible, you know, confounder, it’s your choice. You can certainly skip the permanent dye. But I think a more measured response from the experts is when there’s a question about something, you use it limited, with limited use, or sparingly, right? And that you think about, and I really stressed this this morning, about the other modifiable risk factors, not just hair dye, it’s diet, it’s exercise, it’s obesity, it’s alcohol, it’s smoking, there are so many other lifestyle behaviors that you can theoretically modify that also play into the risks. DYLAN DREYER (09:17:31): But I mean how does it work? So, I know being pregnant, especially at my first trimester I was supposed to get my hair colored. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:17:37): Mm-Hm. DYLAN DREYER (09:17:37): So it’s got to be seeping into the system and chemicals. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:17:41): The blood stream. Yeah. And it is. And I guess over five thousand different chemicals can be in hair products, something that I don’t think that a lot of people necessarily know is that many chemical straighteners contain formaldehyde which is a known carcinogen. But yeah, so the hypothesis is that it goes into the bloodstream and it can actually go to breast tissue where it exerts-- SHEINELLE JONES (09:18:04): That’s so scary. AL ROKER (09:18:04): Yeah. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:18:05): You know-- yeah. AL ROKER (09:18:06): There are different systems, Deborah and I were talking, so she doesn’t do it for the first trimester or whatever. But then goes on to breastfeed, do you have to worry about those? DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:18:15): You know what, I honestly, I’m not aware of that answer. I’m not going to say something that I don’t know. AL ROKER (09:18:21): No. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:18:22): Yeah, so whether or not the-- were you advised not to-- were you advised not to? I don’t know-- DYLAN DREYER (09:18:28): It’s just that the study is just making me wonder. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:18:30): No, definitely ask your doctor about that. I’m sure that there is definite guidance, you know, from OB’s on that front. DYLAN DREYER (09:18:36): I should change the way-- sorry. CRAIG MELVIN (09:18:38): No, no, I was just thinking, first of all, I think for folks who are watching and listening, the size of the sample is significant. Often times we talk about these studies and the size of the sample is small. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:18:46): Right. CRAIG MELVIN (09:18:46): This is forty-six thousand women over the span of a number of years and would also seem as if there’s a nice cross section of racial diversity. To that point, do we know why black women specifically seem to be more prone to this? DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:18:59): Right. So they-- the authors definitely didn’t, you know, offer a definite theory as to why that’s the case. One thing that I didn’t mention this morning which might be important or is important is that there is a higher incident of breast cancer in African-American women. CRAIG MELVIN (09:19:14): In general, yes. SHEINELLE JONES (09:19:15): Yes. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:19:16): Okay. And also something that was kind of a little bit of a subtlety is that these were also women who had a first degree family or was called the sister study because these were women who had sisters or first degree family, relatives with a history of breast cancer. Now look, the author says that these women didn’t have a genetic susceptibility. One expert I reached out to said the age of the sister’s diagnosis would be important because perhaps at a younger age there is a genetic susceptibility. But one theory they offer is that based on prior research that some of the products that are more (unintelligible) African-American women have more of these chemicals and endocrine disrupters. But I don’t think anybody knows for sure. SHEINELLE JONES (09:19:52): You know, for years, I had to relax it, right, straighten my hair. I start getting relaxers when I had Kayin. He’s ten now. And look, you get scalp burns, like chemical burns, and even when I use now sometimes, I’ll use-- it’s called the Brazilian blow out, you put on your edges, the other day I tried it, your nose burns, your eyes burn, you open up doors. You turn on the fans. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:20:09): Yeah. SHEINELLE JONES (09:20:09): And you just do it. DYLAN DREYER (09:20:10): And it’s been on your head-- SHEINELLE JONES (09:20:12): Yeah. We’ve just gotten used to it. But-- AL ROKER (09:20:13): Chris Rock did this terrific documentary, a few years ago called Good Hair. But does this, Natalie, was this going to trigger more research because it seems like-- DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:20:22): Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and you know, here’s the problem, right? Is that the way the study was done as, you know, a prospective trial, and they just-- and they were relying on recall of what the women had used in the year prior to enrollment and then they followed them. That’s not a randomized controlled trial. As we know, that’s the gold standard because that’s the only way that you can really say, look, there appears to be a direct line or a direct cause and effect. So I don’t know that ethically that study can necessarily be done but I think that, you know, again, the experts that have commented on this, say that it’s definitely an area that needs to be researched more as with a lot of the, you know, products and stuff that we are applying or ingesting in our-- DYLAN DREYER (09:21:02): All over, yeah. CRAIG MELVIN (09:21:02): Doctor Natalie, thank you. SHEINELLE JONES (09:21:03): Thank you for coming in. Well, it’s important to say, so no specific brand is linked to cancer, anything like that. DR. NATALIE AZAR (09:21:08): That’s the other thing. No, they were not. They absolutely could not identify which brands or anything were-- SHEINELLE JONES (09:21:13): Just something that we should watch. AL ROKER (09:21:14): Yeah. CRAIG MELVIN (09:21:14): In correlation, not causation. SHEINELLE JONES (09:21:15): Yes. Good. Thank you for talking with us this morning. It’s a hot topic. We’ll be right back.

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04 December, 2019
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