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Environmental and biological monitoring of occupational formaldehyde exposure resulting from the use of products for hair straightening

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Abstract

The evaluation of formaldehyde (FD) exposure in beauty salons, due to the use of hair straightening products, and its relation with genotoxicity biomarkers was performed in this study. Regardless of official recommendations, the inappropriate use of homemade hair creams has became a popular practice in Brazil, and high formaldehyde content in the “progressive straightening” creams can contain mutagens that could increase the incidence of neoplasia in those people who use them. Damage to DNA was assessed by conducting a micronuclei test (MNT) on buccal cells and the comet assay on heparinized venous blood samples. A total of 50 volunteers were recruited at six different beauty salons (labeled A to F). At two salons that used products that did not contain FD (salons D and E), environmental FD concentrations were 0.04 and 0.02 ppm. In contrast, the products used at salons A, B, C, and F contained 5.7, 2.61, 5.9, and 5.79 % of FD, and these salons had environmental FD concentrations of 0.07, 0.14, 0.16, and 0.14 ppm, respectively. Comparison of the beauty salon workers from each of the six beauty salons revealed significant differences in urinary formic acid (FA) concentration before exposure (p = 0.016), urinary FA after exposure (p = 0.004), variation in FA concentration before and after exposure (p = 0.018), environmental FD concentration (p < 0.001), cytogenetic damage detected by the comet assay according to both damage index (p < 0.001) and frequency of damage (p < 0.001), and for karyorrhexis only according to the MNT (p = 0.001).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Rio Grande do Sul (FAPERGS) for providing financial support for this study (process 1303-2551/13-6).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratório de Análises Toxicológicas, Universidade Feevale, ERS 239, 2755, Vila Nova, Novo Hamburgo, 93352-000, Brazil

    Giovana Piva Peteffi, Marina Venzon Antunes, Caroline Carrer, Eduarda Trevizani Valandro & Rafael Linden

  2. Laboratório de Genética e Biologia Molecular, Universidade Feevale, ERS 239, 2755, Novo Hamburgo, 93352-000, Brazil

    Jéssica Glaeser, Larissa Mattos & Luciano Basso da Silva

  3. Curso de Enfermagem, Faculdades Integradas de Taquara, Av. Oscar Martins Rangel, 4500 (ERS 115), Taquara, RS, Brazil

    Sílvia Santos

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  1. Giovana Piva Peteffi
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  2. Marina Venzon Antunes
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  3. Caroline Carrer
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Correspondence to Giovana Piva Peteffi.

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Peteffi, G.P., Antunes, M.V., Carrer, C. et al. Environmental and biological monitoring of occupational formaldehyde exposure resulting from the use of products for hair straightening. Environ Sci Pollut Res 23, 908–917 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-5343-4

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