Those trips to the tanning salon, or vacations at beach resorts, could be making wealthier white women more vulnerable to melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer.
According to a new study of skin cancer cases in sunny California, as many as five out of 100,000 white girls and young women living in the wealthiest 20 percent of neighborhoods were diagnosed with melanoma between 1998 and 2002. That compares to a rate of less than one in 100,000 for their counterparts in the poorest neighborhoods.
“That was a surprise to us,” study co-author Christina A. Clarke, of Stanford University and the Cancer Prevention Institute of California, told WebMD Health News. She added that the researchers assumed that ultra-violet radiation exposure — based on UV levels characteristic of where the melanoma patients have lived — “would be a more important predictor of melanoma risk than socioeconomic status, but that is not what we found.”
Clarke attributed the higher rates of melanoma among the wealthier women to a combination of spending more time in the sun — at home or on vacation — and on tanning beds. “The message of practicing safe sun is just not getting through to the people that need to heed the warning,” Dr. Elizabeth Tanzi, a dermatologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore who was not involved in the study, told Reuters.
Melanoma killed almost 9,000 people in the U.S. last year, according to the National Cancer Institute, with fair-skinned people having the highest risk. Rates among white teenage girls and young women have more than doubled over the past three decades, Clarke said, while rates among teenage boys and young men plateaued after 1980.
That, and the fact that non-Hispanic whites suffer more than 90 percent of the nation’s skin cancer cases, provided a basis for the new study’s focus on white women.
Higher socioeconomic status previously has been linked to an increased melanoma risk among white women but the new study, published in the journal Archives of Dermatology, may be the most comprehensive so far. Researchers analyzed more than 3,800 melanoma cases among white California girls and women ages 15 to 39, while also evaluating the patients’ socioeconomic status, based on their neighborhoods.
Although melanoma rates rose over time for white women in all socioeconomic categories, the study says, the increases were statistically significant only among women from the highest-income areas.
Even in areas with lots of UV radiation, the researchers found that the wealthiest women were diagnosed with melanoma almost 75 percent more often than the poorest women in the same communities.
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