than those who avoid indoor tanning, according to a retrospective study involving 434 melanoma patients.
The incidence of second melanomas over the entire 16-year course of the study was 25.2% among the tanning-bed users and 18.6% for nonusers. Among these study subjects – 27 with tanning-bed exposure and 61 without – median time to the second tumor was 225 days (0.62 years) for exposed patients and 1,280 days (3.50 years) for those with no exposure, the investigators reported.
This study, they wrote, is the first to show that “patients who had second primary melanoma diagnoses were more likely to have had” exposure to artificial UVR. The increased radiation intensity of tanning beds, “as opposed to UVR from ambient sunlight, in a physiologically vulnerable patient population [fair-skinned persons] at an early age contributes to our findings of decreased tumor lag time.”
SOURCE: Li Y et al. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2018;79(6):1101-8.