Hair Dye Brought on Lady to Go Briefly 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 medical doctors 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 he or she was capable of proceed safely coloring her hair utilizing totally different substances.

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 line with the paper, the 61-year-old girl visited the medical doctors a couple of days into growing blurry imaginative and prescient in each eyes. Exams confirmed that her signs had been brought on by injury to her retinas—the layers of cells at the back of the attention that seize mild and convert it into the data wanted for us and our brains to course of imaginative and prescient.

The lady had no current medical historical past that may clarify this retinal injury, also called retinopathy, and the medical doctors failed to search out different frequent causes of it of their exams, resembling an infection or most cancers. However the girl did point out that simply earlier than her signs started, she had lately used a store-bought hair dye that contained the chemical para-phenylenediamine.

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

RAHDAA resembles one other type of retinopathy tied to the usage of anti-cancer medicine that inhibit the exercise of MEK proteins. Each these medicine and fragrant amines might trigger retinal injury by interfering with a pathway vital 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 might be at larger danger, based mostly on case experiences (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 exams confirmed that her imaginative and prescient remained pretty much as good as ever, although she did appear to nonetheless have some lingering, if asymptomatic, adjustments in her retina brought on by the dye.

Whereas these instances are “presumably uncommon,” the report authors say that different medical doctors 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 exams fail to search out another clear reply.