If you have decided to get a tan for the New Year, scientists urge you to think carefully. Even one visit to a tanning bed can negatively affect the state of your body.
Remember how it used to be fashionable to go to tanning beds? Women would visit them regularly to look as if they had just returned from a long vacation by the sea. Now, the trend for tanning is slowly returning, joining the trend for a healthy lifestyle. The body should be healthy, with abs, and the skin should be bronzed and even.
However, if you want to get a tan, it is better to do it naturally, not forgetting about sunscreen. According to a new study conducted by Northwestern Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco, visiting tanning beds nearly triples the risk of developing melanoma, an aggressive skin cancer. Moreover, this habit also "breaks" our DNA.
Scientist Pedram Jeddari has been researching skin cancer for over 20 years. He noticed that melanoma is most often found in women over 50 years old. The expert decided to investigate the patterns behind this statistic.
To do this, Jeddari and his research team compared the medical records of about 3,000 people who visited tanning beds with the medical records of 3,000 people of the same age who never used tanning beds.
The team found that melanoma was diagnosed in 5.1% of people who visited tanning beds, compared to 2.1% among those who never tanned this way. After adjusting for age, sex, history of sunburns, and hereditary predisposition, it was established that visiting tanning beds increases the risk of skin cancer by 2.85 times.
Moreover, melanoma appeared on areas of the body protected from ultraviolet radiation, such as the lower back and buttocks. These results confirm the hypothesis that tanning beds may cause more serious DNA damage than the sun.
To test this hypothesis, scientists used new genomic technologies to sequence the DNA of individual melanocytes (skin cells that produce pigment, where melanoma originates) from three groups of skin donors.
The first group included 11 people who had tanned in tanning beds for a long time.
The second group consisted of 9 people who had never used tanning beds but were comparable to the first group in age, sex, and cancer risk.
The third group included skin samples from 6 people who had passed away. This was necessary for a control check.
The scientists sequenced 182 individual melanocytes and found that the skin cells of those who used tanning beds had almost twice as many mutations as those in the control group, and they were more likely to contain mutations associated with melanoma.
"When exposed to the sun outdoors, about 20% of the skin suffers the most damage," Jeddari said. "In those who use tanning beds, we observed those same dangerous mutations almost all over the skin surface."
Experts are convinced that tanning beds change skin cells at the molecular level, which does not happen with regular sunlight exposure. Scientists want tanning beds to be banned for minors in different countries and for educational campaigns to be conducted, paying special attention to the harm of artificial sun.
"When you buy a pack of cigarettes, it says that it may lead to lung cancer. We need to conduct a similar campaign against the use of tanning beds — they are a class one carcinogen, just like tobacco smoke and asbestos," Jeddari says.
He urges everyone who diligently tans to get checked by a dermatologist and oncologist. And to stop visiting tanning beds as soon as possible for the sake of their health.
