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excerpt:"ionally shows very low cancer rates, Stein said.
"We see a surprising number of young women coming in with melanoma, and a lot of them say they've used tanning beds," Stein told LiveScience.com. "By far, by far, the majority of users of indoor tanning beds are young women."
While some dermatologists believe that other factors, such as increased UV exposure resulting from the hole in the ozone layer, contribute to the rise in melanoma rates over the last 18 years, the irrefutable link between indoor tanning and melanoma makes tanning beds the prime suspect, Tsoukas said.
In a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, frequent tanning bed users proved three times more likely to develop melanoma than non-users, and subjects that used tanning beds for any amount of time showed a 74-percent higher rate of melanoma than non-users, according to research published online May 27 in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
That study did not investigate the percentage of indoor tanners who developed melanoma, rather showing the difference between users and non-users.
How tanning causes cancer
Indoor and outdoor tanning can be dangerous, because the same ultraviolet radiation that provokes a tan also damages DNA. In fact, exposure to the mid-day sun can produce as many as 40,000 DNA errors an hour, said Regina Santella, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York.
