Hair Dye Prompted Girl to Go Quickly Blind

A French girl’s dye job inadvertently turned out to be perilous for her imaginative and prescient. In a brand new case report this week, the lady’s docs describe how she started to expertise retinal detachment and imaginative and prescient loss quickly after utilizing hair dye containing sure chemical compounds. Fortunately, her eyesight returned to regular over time as soon as she stopped utilizing the product and she or he was in a position to proceed safely coloring her hair utilizing completely different elements.

Medical doctors on the Edouard Herriot Hospital and the LEO Ophthalmological Heart in France reported the eye-catching medical story Thursday within the journal JAMA Ophthalmology. In response to the paper, the 61-year-old girl visited the docs a couple of days into growing blurry imaginative and prescient in each eyes. Assessments confirmed that her signs have been brought on by harm to her retinas—the layers of cells at the back of the attention that seize mild and convert it into the knowledge wanted for us and our brains to course of imaginative and prescient.

The girl had no current medical historical past that might clarify this retinal harm, also referred to as retinopathy, and the docs failed to seek out different frequent causes of it of their checks, comparable to an infection or most cancers. However the girl did point out that simply earlier than her signs started, she had just lately used a store-bought hair dye that contained the chemical para-phenylenediamine.

Para-phenylenediamine belongs to a gaggle of chemical compounds referred to as fragrant amines. And as luck would have it, the docs have been conscious of different current instances of middle-aged ladies experiencing retinopathy related to using hair dye containing fragrant amines (shortened to RAHDAA). Given the timing of her eye hassle, and the dearth of some other clear different rationalization, they decided that the lady had developed her personal case of RAHDAA.

RAHDAA resembles one other type of retinopathy tied to using anti-cancer medicine that inhibit the exercise of MEK proteins. Each these medicine and fragrant amines might trigger retinal harm by interfering with a pathway necessary to the survival and homeostasis of retinal pigment epithelial cells, the authors say. The situation does look like uncommon, although individuals who have scalp wounds whereas utilizing hair dyes with fragrant amines may very well be at larger threat, primarily based on case studies (the lady on this case didn’t have such wounds).

As for the lady, her story has an eventual pleased ending. She instantly stopped utilizing the dye, and inside 4 months time, her imaginative and prescient returned to regular, with no signal of retinal detachment. At a check-up 4 years later, the lady reported that she had switched to amine-free hair dye and checks confirmed that her imaginative and prescient remained nearly as good as ever, although she did appear to nonetheless have some lingering, if asymptomatic, modifications in her retina brought on by the dye.

Whereas these instances are “presumably uncommon,” the report authors say that different docs ought to concentrate on this situation and prepared to think about amine-containing dyes as a potential explanation for their affected person’s retina points, particularly when preliminary checks fail to seek out some other clear reply.