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  • 2014-07-07 (xsd:date)
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  • Is the Link Between Sun Exposure and Skin Cancer a Myth? (en)
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  • In May 2014 the popular press reported on an article that had recently been published in the Journal of Internal Medicine entitled Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for all-cause mortality. The common reporting on that article generally mentioned that a study conducted by Swedish researchers had found that women who avoided sunbathing actually had twice the mortality rate of women who had significant exposure to the sun: The results of this study were then summarized by some medical-related websites of dubious validity with misleading headlines such as Scientists Blow the Lid on Cancer and Sunscreen Myth and assertions that The link between melanoma and sun exposure is unproven. There's no conclusive evidence that sunburns lead to cancer. There is no real proof that sunscreens protect against melanoma. There's no proof that increased exposure to the sun increases the risk of melanoma. In fact, the referenced study came nowhere close to proving that the link between skin cancer and sun exposure is a myth. The researchers who performed the study tracked a group of 29,518 women in Sweden across twenty years and charted their typical exposure to sunlight and other potentially related factors. At the end of the study period, they found that women who avoided exposure to the sun had a mortality rate approximately twice that of women who had the most exposure to the sun: However, those results cannot be summarized in any reasonable way as proving that -- contrary to previous medical wisdom -- high exposure to sunlight is beneficial, exposure to sunlight is not related to the development of skin cancer, or that the use of sunscreen is pointless or actually increases the chances of contracting skin cancer. The strongest conclusion that might have been drawn from the study was the rather narrow one that people with characteristics of the study group — that is, light-skinned Caucasian women living in parts of the world with limited sunshine and a low UV index — would probably be better off with some sun exposure rather than no sun exposure because the human body needs some sunlight in order to produce vitamin D, which is essential to good health: As the researchers noted in their own conclusions, avoidance of sun exposure may have more widespread deleterious effects among other groups of women: (en)
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