Woman left with kidney damage, vomiting, diarrhoea and back pain after a trip to the hairdressers

A WOMAN suffered acute kidney damage three times over the course of two years after routine trips to the hairdressers.

The 26-year-old had had no previous health issues but was left with back pain and fever while battling bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea.

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The common denominator in all three incidents?

The woman, from Tunisia, underwent a permanent hair straightening treatment at her usual salon.

Reporting on the horrifying case, doctors said one of the products used during treatment likely caused the damage to her organs.

She visited the same hair salon to receive the popular “Brazilian” hair treatment – which chemically straightens tresses for long periods of time – in June 2020, April 2021 and July 2022.

During each visit, the woman felt a burning on her scalp as the treatment was applied and she broke out in ulcers.

And following her hairdresser trips, she’d come down with vomiting, diarrhoea, fever, and back pain.

Doctors found she also had raised levels of creatinine in her blood, a sign that her kidneys were malfunctioning.

She also had blood in her pee, but showed no other signs of infection.

Thankfully, the woman’s kidney function improved “rapidly” after each salon visit, so the side effects seem to be short-lived in her case at least.

According to the report published in in The New England Journal of Medicine, the woman’s hair was treated with a straightening cream containing a chemical called glyoxylic acid.

The authors suggested that the acid absorbed through her skin and reached her kidneys and caused damage upon when it was broken down.

“Glycolic acid derivatives contained in hair-straightening products could be absorbed through the skin and metabolised into oxalate by the liver, thereby leading to calcium oxalate nephropathy,” they wrote.

Hair straightening treatments use chemicals to diminish frizz and straighten out the texture of your hair. It usually lasts a few months, until new hair grows to replace the hair that was treated.

A straightening solution will usually be applied to the hair, before it’s “sealed” in using heat from blow dryer or straightener.

Historically, these treatments made use of the toxic chemical formaldehyde, which has been banned in the UK as well as Europe.

Glyoxylic acid is thought to be a potentially safer alternative for hair straightening products, though a recent study has suggested that the chemical might not be without harm.

It found that of 26 patients in Israel with kidney injury, eleven had used products containing derivatives of glycolic acid, a chemical that is broken down into glyoxylic acid in the liver. 

To further examine whether glycoxic acid could lead to kidney damage, doctors involved in the 26-year-old woman’s case conducted a lab experiment on mice.

They applied the straightening product used for the woman’s hair – which contained 10 per cent glyoxylic acid – on the backs of five mice, and slathered petroleum jelly on the backs of another five rodents, which acted as a comparison group.

Researchers analysed the mice’s urine the next day.

Those exposed to the hair straghtening cream had “elongated” crystals of a chemical compound called calcium oxalate monohydrate in their urine.

John Bucher, a retired senior scientist at the US National Institutes of Health who was not involved in the report, told Live Science: “It’s known that humans metabolize glyoxylic acid to oxalic acid, which binds calcium to form calcium oxalate crystals.

“If these accumulate to sufficiently high levels they can cause damage to the kidney and result in the symptoms reported.”

The mice exposed to the hair product also had “significantly” higher creatinine levels in their blood than the petroleum jelly group after 28 hours.

They also had dense deposits of calcium oxalate monohydrate in their kidneys, researchers found.

“These results provide evidence that hair-straightening cream containing glyoxylic acid is responsible for calcium oxalate–induced nephropathy after hair-straightening procedures of the type described here,” they wrote.

“Glyoxylic acid was patented and introduced recently in hair-straightening products as a seemingly safer alternative to formulations containing formaldehyde,” researchers went on.

But they said the woman’s case could indicate that there are dangers to using glyoxylic acid in hair-straightening products. 

“In consideration of the potential nephrotoxicity of topical glyoxylic acid, products containing this compound should be avoided and, we would proffer, discontinued from the market,” the doctors stated.