What is Indoor Tanning?
Ads for tanning salons, sun lamps and tanning beds promise a bronzed body year-round, but experts agree that ultraviolet (UV) radiation from these devices damages the skin and poses serious health risks. Sunburns and tans are signs of skin damage. Deliberate tanning, either indoors or out, increases your risk of melanoma and non- melanoma skin cancer.
Tanning -Myths and Reality
Here are some claims commonly made about indoor tanning – and the facts.
Get a beautiful tan indoors without increasing your risk of skin cancer.
The lamps used in tanning booths and beds emit two forms of ultraviolet (UV) radiation – UVA and UVB. UVB rays penetrate the top layers of your skin and are most responsible for burns. UVA rays penetrate to the deeper layers of skin and often are associated with allergic reactions, like a rash. Both UVA and UVB rays damage the skin and can lead to skin cancer. What’s more, scientists say, tanning can cause premature aging, immune suppression, and serious eye damage.
Indoor tanning is safer than the sun because the environment is controlled.
Sun lamps may be more dangerous than the sun because they can be used at the same high intensity every day of the year. Radiation from the sun varies in intensity with the time of day, the season, and cloud cover. Studies show that many people who tan indoors get burns.
Indoor tanning is approved by the government.
No U.S. government agency recommends the use of indoor tanning equipment. And the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization, also has concluded that tanning devices that emit UV radiation are more dangerous than previously thought. IARC moved these devices into the highest cancer risk category.
Indoor tanning is a safe way to increase vitamin D levels.
Vitamin D has many roles in human health. For example, it is essential for promoting good bone health. While UVB radiation helps your body produce vitamin D, you don’t need a tan to get that benefit. In fact, 10 to 15 minutes of unprotected natural sun exposure on your face and hands 2 to 3 times a week during the summer gives you a healthy dose of vitamin D. You also can get vitamin D from food: good sources include low-fat milk, salmon, tuna, and fortified orange juice.
Difference between Indoor Tannings vs. Sunlight
The sun's rays contain two types of ultraviolet radiation that affect your skin: UVA and UVB. UVB radiation burns the upper layers of skin (the epidermis), causing sunburns. UVA radiation penetrates to the lower layers of the epidermis, where it triggers cells called melanocytes) to produce melanin. Melanin is the brown pigment that causes tanning. Both UVA and UVB rays contribute to skin aging. Both types also can cause potentially cancerous changes in your cells' DNA. And, according to a recent study, radiation from just 10 indoor-tanning sessions in 2 weeks can suppress a person's cancer-fighting immune system.
Tanning beds use UVA light, but UVA rays penetrate the skin more deeply than UVB rays, so they can cause just as much — if not more — damage. Plus, the concentration of UVA rays from a tanning bed is greater than the amount of UVA rays a person gets from the sun. And despite manufacturer claims, some tanning lamps do also emit UVB light.
So if you try indoor tanning, you'll absorb far more rays in the long run, significantly age your skin, and put yourself at even greater risk for skin cancer.
What Tanning Salons Don't Tell You
Studies show that users of tanning beds and tanning lamps have much higher risks of basal and squamous cell carcinoma, the two most common types of skin cancer. Doctors also know that young people are more at risk for melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer. It used to be that mostly older people got melanoma, but doctors now see more people in their twenties (or even younger) with serious cases of skin cancer.
Don't rely on tanning salons to let you know about the risks of using their product — they're in business to make money, after all. Sometimes employees actually don't know much about the damage tanning beds can do. They mistakenly believe they are safer than the sun, even though they can do as much damage or more.
Laws are changing to protect consumers, but some states are farther along than others when it comes to passing tanning bed laws. In most places, it's up to the salon to watch out for customers and maintain their equipment.
How to Minimizing tanning Risk
People who have tanned in the past already have skin damage — even if they can't see it yet — and need to be very cautious about additional UV exposure. Everyone (even those who tan easily) should wear sunscreen or sun-protective clothing (or both) while outdoors, and have their skin checked periodically by a dermatologist for suspicious moles or other lesions.
You don't have to go without that sun-bronzed look. The new generation of self-tanners and spray-on tans offer easy, realistic results at a reasonable price. Just be sure to use a daily sunblock with an SPF of at least 15 when you go outdoors since fake tanners don't protect you against sunburn!
New Research-There Is No Such Thing as a Safe Tan: GW Researchers Break Tanning Misconceptions
A new study conducted by GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) researchers Edward C. De Fabo, Ph.D., Frances P. Noonan, Ph.D., and Anastas Popratiloff, M.D., Ph.D., has been published in the journal Nature Communications. Their paper, entitled "Melanoma induction by ultraviolet A but not ultraviolet B radiation requires melanin pigment," was published in June 2012. This is the first time that UV-induced melanin formation (tanning), traditionally thought to protect against skin cancer, is shown to be directly involved in melanoma formation in mammals," said De Fabo, who is professor emeritus at SMHS. "Skin melanoma is the most lethal of the skin cancers. Our study shows that we were able to discover this new role for melanin by cleanly separating UVA from UVB and exposing our experimental melanoma animal model with these separated wavebands using our unique UV light system designed and set up at GW. Dermatologists have been warning for years there is no such thing as a safe tan and this new data appears to confirm this.
Their research uses a mammalian model to investigate melanoma formed in response to precise spectrally defined ultraviolet wavelengths and biologically relevant doses. They show that melanoma induction by ultraviolet A (320-400 nm) requires the presence of melanin pigment and is associated with oxidative DNA damage within melanocytes. In contrast, ultraviolet B radiation (280-320 nm) initiates melanoma in a pigment-independent manner associated with direct ultraviolet B DNA damage. The researchers identified two ultraviolet wavelength-dependent pathways for the induction of CMM and the study describes an unexpected and significant role for melanin within the melanocyte in melanoma genesis.
Also new is our discovery that UV induction of melanin, as a melanoma-causing agent, works when skin is exposed only to UVA and not UVB radiation. This is especially important since melanoma formation has been correlated with sunbed use as many epidemiological studies have shown. One possible reason for this is that tanning lamps are capable of emitting UVA radiation up to 12 times, or higher, the UVA intensity of sunlight at high noon. Melanin plus UVA is known to cause photo-oxidation, a suspected, but still to be proved, mechanism for the formation of melanoma as we describe in our study, De Fabo said.
(Source- Journal Nature Communications)
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