Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
Tanning bed
users are known to have a higher risk of skin cancer, but for the first time
researchers have found that young indoor tanners undergo genetic changes that
can lead to more mutations in their skin cells than people twice their age.
The study, which was led by UC San Francisco and
Northwestern University, appeared Dec. 12 in Science
Advances.
"We found that tanning bed users in their 30s and
40s had even more mutations than people in the general population who were in
their 70s and 80s," said Bishal Tandukar, Ph.D., a UCSF postdoctoral
scholar in Dermatology who is the co-first author of the study. "In other
words, the skin of tanning bed users appeared decades older at the genetic
level."
Such mutations can lead to skin cancer, which is the
most common cancer in the U.S., according to the American Cancer Society. Among those skin cancers is melanoma, which accounts for only about 1% of skin cancers but causes most of
the deaths. About 11,000 Americans die annually from melanoma, primarily from
exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
UV radiation occurs naturally in sunlight, as well as
in artificial light sources like tanning beds. Rates of melanoma have risen along with the use of tanning beds in recent years,
disproportionately affecting young women, who are the main clients of the
tanning industry.
Numerous countries effectively ban tanning beds, and
the World Health Organization classifies them as a group 1 carcinogen, the same
category as tobacco smoke and asbestos, but tanning beds remain legal and
popular in the U.S.
In their study, the authors looked at the medical
records of more than 32,000 dermatology patients including their tanning bed
usage, history of sunburn, and family history of melanoma. They also obtained
skin samples from 26 donors and sequenced 182 cells.
The young tanning bed users had more skin mutations
than people twice their age, especially in their lower backs, an area that does
not get much damage from sunlight but has a great deal of exposure from tanning
beds.
"The skin of tanning bed users was riddled with
the seeds of cancer—cells with mutations known to lead to melanoma," said senior
author A. Hunter Shain, Ph.D., associate professor in the UCSF Department of
Dermatology.
"We cannot reverse a mutation once it occurs, so
it is essential to limit how many mutations accumulate in the first
place," said Shain, whose laboratory focuses on the biology of skin
cancer. "One of the simplest ways to do that is to avoid exposure to
artificial UV radiation."
Provided by University of California, San Francisco
by University
of California, San Francisco
edited by Andrew
Zinin
Source: Indoor
tanning makes youthful skin much older on a genetic level
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