Evidence links tanning beds to skin cancer

Women who use tanning salons have a somewhat increased risk of skin cancer, according to a US study that adds to evidence that baking in a tan bed can be as bad as baking under the sun. The study, by a team at Harvard Medical School, looked at data from nearly 730,000 US nurses followed for 20 years and found that women who used tanning beds in their youth were more likely than others to develop skin cancer — basal cell carcinoma in particular. Though many studies have linked tanning beds to a higher skin cancer risk, the link to basal cell carcinoma, by far the most common form of skin cancer, have been inconsistent. “We... investigated whether frequency of tanning bed use during high school/college and at ages 25 to 36 years were associated with a risk of basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma,” wrote Jiali Han and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. “Our data provide evidence for a dose-response relationship between tanning bed use and the risk of skin cancers, especially basal cell carcinoma, and the association is stronger for patients with a younger age at exposure.” Women who used tanning beds at least four times per year between high school and age 35 were 15 per cent more likely to develop basal cell carcinoma than non-users. There were similar risks tied to melanoma and squamous cell carcinoma, a skin cancer that, like basal cell, has a high cure rate. But with melanoma the finding was not statistically significant, which means it could be due to chance.