No TAN is SAFE.

Reuters via MSNBC- 


Adolescent girls and young women living in wealthy communities were more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma in a new study of skin cancer cases in California.

The authors think that might be because wealthier women may be spending lots of time out in the sun - at home and on vacation - and frequenting tanning beds.

"It's frightening actually," Dr. Elizabeth Tanzi, a dermatologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore who was not involved in the study, told Reuters Health.

"The message of practicing safe sun is just not getting through to the people that need to heed the warning," said Tanzi, who also heads the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery in Washington, D.C.

Melanoma is the most lethal form of skin cancer, killing almost 9,000 people in the U.S. last year, according to the National Cancer Institute. Exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light is known to increase the risk of melanoma.

 

Cases of melanoma have been rising in young white women in the United States in recent decades, more than doubling since the early 1970s.

In the current study, Dr. Christina Clarke of the Cancer Prevention Institute of California and her colleagues analyzed data from a registry of more than 3,800 melanoma cases in white California girls and women aged 15 to 39. They paired the cancer statistics with information from the U.S. census to determine the socioeconomic status of each of the women, based on household incomes and education levels in their neighborhoods.
 
In the wealthiest 20 percent of California neighborhoods, four or five out of 100,000 young white women were diagnosed with melanoma over the 5-year period from 1998 to 2002. For the poorest group, the rate was less than one in 100,000 over the same period.

Compared to data from a decade earlier (1988 to1992), rates of melanoma increased in white girls and young women as a whole - but the increases were most obvious in wealthier women.

Wealthy women weren't more likely to get melanoma just because they lived in the sunniest areas of California. When the authors calculated how much UV light women in different neighborhoods were exposed to, they found that the wealthiest women living in areas with lots of UV radiation were still diagnosed with melanoma almost 75 percent more often than the poorest women who lived in communities with the most UV radiation.

Clarke said that it also wasn't likely that wealthy girls would be diagnosed with melanoma more often just because they have better access to health care. Invasive melanoma, she told Reuters Health, "is going to get very serious very quickly" - it's not something a woman would live with for years while thinking she was healthy.

A combination of outdoor sun exposure and tanning beds were probably to blame for higher rates of melanoma in wealthier girls, Clarke said. Mid-winter trips to Mexico or Hawaii, for example, require money nd can be dangerous after skin has been covered up for months, she said.

Clarke said that wealthy girls especially are surrounded by the message that being tanned all year round is cool - they even have Katy Perry singing about it. But the new findings, she said, "should really cause us to think, 'how cool is a tan if it puts lighter skinned women at risk of deadly cancer?'"

One solution, Clarke said, could be bans on tanning beds for young girls and more education for wealthy girls and women to try to make tanning "uncool."

"The thought is that 'well, it can't happen to me,'" Tanzi said. "It's the invincible nature of a teenager. Tanning is still seen as somewhat okay to do."

The message that needs to get across, Tanzi said, is that "no tan is safe."

that picture is frightening....

i gave up on ever getting a tan when i was in my 20's...   this fair-skinned norwegian just didn't have the ability to produce that much melanin...  i would just burn....   

i was always the bleach-white one in the group, but the trade-off is that now i am in my 50's my skin looks fabulous, and when i tell people how old i am, they don't believe me!

sunscreen is my friend!



jeris

 No way!  You are SO fair.  Fried......

sunning myself is something I have tried to give up and only managed to cut back. luckily I don't tolerate heat very well so in actual SUMMER I am not very tan. but Spring and Fall? I sit in the sun.

got my sunblock on but still I tan a bit.
 
you'd think that poster would put me off - well, it has! I am giving up weight lifting!!

I am giving up weight lifting and wanting to be a skinny chick........and blond too.

good plan!  I took another look at the poster and I'm considering switching species!

Ahhhh.. I can't give up my tan.. I know I should, but I love being in the sun! I don't do tanning beds ever, but in the summer I am a fish. I used to never wear sunblock, and have never had a sunburn, but in recent years I have started wearing some. I guess that is better than nothing..

I'm outside every minute in the summer, too... either in the pool or painting outside. When I turned 30, I decided that I HAD to wear sunscreen, so I slather up, anyhoo.

I had a lady tell me yesterday that I didn't look 42... she thought I was 10 years younger, so I guess the sunscreen helped!  (And I asked her to be my friend because I love her so much for telling me that I look younger. I may have scared her. )  

I notice that I have sun damage around my eyes, though. They used to be cute when we called them "freckles"... but now I think they might just be called, "Hey, you have dark spots around your eyes, Old Broad." 

Here's my PSA: 

My father died from metastatic melanoma at the age of 51.  His melanoma was removed 5 years earlier, but it still ended up taking his life.  It is very very real, people and once it spreads to the organs you've got about 90 days left of torturous hell that can only be managed by strong doses of morphine.  I prayed every day that God hurry up and take him home.

Gotta dark misshapen mole?  Get it checked out.  Ignoring it will not make it go away.

I am at extremely high risk so even though I love the sun I still wear a hat, a muumuu an umbrella and imported sunscreen whilst out on the beach... yeah, I'm one those ladies LOL.

~GG

Sigh.