Industrial Uses: As a food preservative in small quantities.
Personal Care Products: Cosmetics and personal care products, such as shampoos, conditioners, hair styling gels, nail creams, foundations, facial masks, skin creams, and deodorants. Parabens can be an ingredient in baby lotions, shampoos, and other personal care products for children.
Purpose: Preservative. Also found at low levels in nature.
The World Health Organization, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others consider this chemical an unclassifiable carcinogen.
British researchers have found that chemicals from underarm deodorants and other cosmetics can build up inside the body.
They have found traces of chemicals called parabens in tissue taken from women with breast cancer. While there is no evidence parabens cause cancer, the scientists have called for the use of parabens to be reviewed.
The cosmetics industry insists the chemicals, which are used as preservatives and are approved for use by regulators, are safe.
Dr Philippa Darbre and colleagues at the University of Reading carried out tests on samples of 20 different human breast tumors. Writing in the Journal of Applied Toxicology, they say they found parabens present in significant amounts in 18 out of 20 breast cancer tumors and traces of parabens in the other two tumors. (Darbre and others 2004).
Their tests suggested the chemicals had seeped into the tissue after being applied to the skin. “This is the first study to show their accumulation in human tissues,” said Dr Darbre. “It demonstrates that if people are exposed to these chemicals, then the chemicals will accumulate in their bodies.” (BBC News 01 November 2004).
It must be noted that the study by Darbre and others (2004) utilized a small sample of patients (n=20), no healthy breast tissue (or other tissues from affected women) was analyzed and the source(s) of the parabens found in the breast tumors and routes of exposure were not identified. There is a need for further research to establish the significance of the presence of parabens in these tumors and to establish a link between parabens in underarm cosmetics and the development of breast cancer.
Researchers from the Department of Biology and Biochemistry of Brunel University in the United Kingdom have conducted a study and found that the parabens – alkyl hydroxy parabens — alpha hydroxy benzoate (methyl-, ethyl-, propyl-, and butyl-paraben) are weakly estrogenic. In other words, these preservatives have the ability to mimic estrogen in the body with butylparaben being the most potent.
The study also stated that “…a surprisingly large number of chemicals in everyday use may possess weak estrogenic activity, at least in vitro. This contention is supported by a preliminary announcement by Tong and others of a very intelligent and thorough SAR-based modeling study of the 57,000 chemicals in the database of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The authors suggest that over 3,000 of the 57,000 chemicals probably possess weak estrogenic activity (at least in vitro)”
“Given their use in a wide range of commercially available topical preparations, it is suggested that the safety in use of these chemicals should be reassessed, with particular attention being paid to estimation of the actual levels of systemic exposure of humans exposed to these chemicals” (Toxicology of Applied Pharmacology, 1998: 153:12-19).
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