By Staff Reports
(Hawaii)– From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Skin doctors and researchers say indoor tanning raises the risk of skin cancer, but a lot of people do it. Eleni Linos of the University of California, San Francisco found evidence of that in data on close to 407,000 people in the United States, Europe and Australia.
Linos says almost 36 percent of adults had done indoor tanning at least once, and university students were the most common users – 55 percent. She says U.S. tanning rates are similar to those overall rates.
Linos emphasizes the risk:
“We estimate that almost half a million skin cancers each year are due to indoor tanning – and it’s important to note that these are potentially preventable skin cancers.”
The study in the journal JAMA Dermatology was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
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HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.