Eleni Linos, MD, a leader in the field of skin cancer research and prevention, is a CTSI K Scholar and assistant professor in the UCSF School of Medicine. Her study on tanning beds and links to cancer was supported by a UCSF-CTSI KL2 grant.
By Sabrina Taveriese via NYTimes.com
...
Indoor tanning might seem like a fashion that faded with the 1980s, but it remains a persistent part of American adolescence, popular spring, summer and fall but especially in winter, when bodies are palest. Salons with names like Eternal Summer and Tan City dot strip malls across the country, promising prettiness and, in some cases, better health, despite a growing body of evidence that links indoor tanning to skin cancer.
For decades, researchers saw indoor tanning as little more than a curiosity. But a review of the scientific evidence published last year estimated that tanning beds account for as many as 400,000 cases of skin cancer in the United States each year, including 6,000 cases of melanoma, the deadliest form.
And clinicians are concerned about the incidence rate of melanoma in women under 40, which has risen by a third since the early 1990s, according to data from the National Cancer Institute. (Death rates have not gone up, however, a testament to earlier detection and better treatment.)
“We’re seeing younger and younger patients coming to us with skin cancer,” said Dr. Eleni Linos, assistant professor of dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco. “That is a new phenomenon.”
As such worrying signs have accumulated, tanning has emerged as a serious public health concern. Last year, the surgeon general called on Americans to reduce their exposure to the sun and tanning beds to prevent skin cancer, and the Food and Drug Administration invoked its most serious risk warning, lifting tanning beds from a category that included Band-Aids to that of potentially harmful medical devices. The Obama administration’s 2010 health care law imposed a little-noticed 10 percent tax on tanning salons.
Read the full article on NYTimes.com