Make it a Summer of Skin Care
photo courtesy of Kaiser Permanente
Let's hope this family enjoys their day at the beach, while wearing plenty of sunblock. The wide-brimmed hat the woman is wearing is highly recommended by medical experts to protect against the sun's more harmful rays.
As people head out for that beach, lake, or pool to get a nice healthy tan this summer and build up their body’s stores of Vitamin D while avoiding getting sunburned, dermatologists would like to help you improve those plans just a bit.
People can avoid sunburn entirely while unwittingly exposing themselves to skin cancer. Medical experts say that your body needs very little sunlight to produce plenty of Vitamin D—and tans aren’t actually good for you.
Tans are evidence of damage to DNA in the skin, even if it looks great, says dermatologist Akhil Wadhera, M.D., who heads the Cancer Committee at Kaiser Permanente’s San Leandro and Fremont medical centers,
Skin cancer is the hidden danger of having fun in the sun, Wadhera said. If you use enough of it, Sunblock does a good job of blocking sunburn — but not all sunblocks guard against the kind of ultraviolet radiation that gives you skin cancer.
Children are at the most risk, said Wadhera. Not only do children tend to get more sun exposure than adults, but they are more prone to the kind of skin damage that will later cause cancer. One blistering sunburn in a child is thought to double their risk of later developing skin cancer, while he said an adult would need to get five of those for the same risk increase.
He and Kaiser suggest avoiding the sun entirely between the peak hours of 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. or seeking shade if you must be outside, wearing a hat, and using sunblock, plenty of it. He suggests using about an ounce to cover all exposed body parts or a teaspoon per body part, much more than most people use.
The keyword to look for on the sunblock’s label is “broad-spectrum,” Wadhera said, indicating protection against UV-B and UV-A, which causes skin cancer. Sometimes, he said protection against UV-A is mentioned specifically if there is any.
Wadhera suggests using sunblock with an SPF of at least 30 but cautions that research hasn’t confirmed additional protection from higher SPFs.
The U.S. sees three to four million cases of skin cancer diagnosed in a year, with melanoma making up around 200,000 of those. But melanoma kills eight to nine thousand people a year, about one a minute. The other two kinds are more easily treated.
Melanoma is highly curable if caught early, Wadhera said, with a 95 percent or higher five-year survival rate. Even if it’s metastasized, new drugs are much more effective at stopping it than were treatments even a decade ago, he said.
One should look out for an irregular shape with sometimes irregular borders, multiple colors, a diameter greater than 6 millimeters (about the size of a pencil eraser), changes in shape, size, or color, and a brand-new lesion.
UV-A rays don’t even get slowed down by clouds, even if sunburn chances decrease so that one can be fully exposed to skin cancer on a cloudy day, Wadhera said. Car windows similarly block UV-B but not UV-A, so they protect against sunburn but not skin cancer.