Airdate: May 17th, 2023
More people are diagnosed with skin cancer each year in the United States than all other cancers combined. More than two people die of skin cancer every hour. Having five or more sunburns in your lifetime doubles your risk for melanoma.
Late spring and moving into summer more people will be outdoors and exposed to the sun.
May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month and a good time to learn more about skin cancer.
Exposure to UV radiation from the sun is what causes the great majority of skin cancers
On The Spark Wednesday was Dr. Kent Zettel, a surgeon with UPMC in Central Pennsylvania, who described how skin cancers present themselves,”What you’re going to see is a little lump, depending on the types. Right. There’s different types of skin cancer, like a basal cell carcinoma, these are from the basal cells or the deep part of the skin that turn into a cancer. And some of these are like little pearly appearing lumps. Then there’s the squamous cell carcinoma that is the more superficial part of the skin. And they tend to be low plaques sometimes. And then they could eventually turn to ulcerations. So when we start talking about the more scary ones like melanoma, these usually start with moles or something like that, that change over time. So what you’re seeing in appearance are like little lumps or some ulcers or lesions that are coming out with melanomas. You’re looking for moles that change in appearance, changing color, increase in size. We talk about the ABCDE. So, A is for asymmetric border, right? It’s not a round circle like you’ve seen before. B, for border for an irregular border. So it’s not smooth. It’s got a lot of folds. C for colors, more than one color. Sure. You’re talking about tumor colors, diameter. We’re talking six millimeters. Nobody knows what six millimeters is. So we talk about look at your pencil eraser. It is the size of your pencil eraser or bigger. Those are things to be concerned about. And then the big E is evolution. If you see something changing, you know, that’s something you should have your doctor evaluate.”
Dr. Zettel talked about to protect yourself against the sun,”There’s sunscreen, there’s sunblock. You know, you’re talking about the different sunscreen is more of these little benzene rings that are coming from inside the sunscreen itself that absorbs the UV radiation. And so we talk about the the when you talk about UVB, and that’s what we detect. But the sun also admits UVA radiation. But we just look at the UVB and that’s how we scale, how good the sunscreen is. So the sunscreen, the absorbs the radiation, well, you got sunblock. So the sunblock tends to be thicker. It’s harder to rub on. You always see the people with the white chalky stuff on them. And, some people don’t like that. I’m not going to wear it. And so I think at this point, please wear something. Right. If you’re if you say, you know what, I don’t like the paraffin and the sunscreen and I’d rather be more organic than wear the somewhat pleased because skin cancer is for real, wearing a shirt, wearing a hat, sunglasses, cotton that sells cotton t shirts, has a SPF rating of five. You think how low that is? But that blocks 80% of UV radiation. Your sun blocks that we are sunscreens that we usually prefer is at least an SPF 30 or more. And so that’s going to block off 90, 97% of your UV radiation. So that’s pretty significant. Beyond that, 98 is SPF 50. You’re not getting much of a big difference for your cost. So, you know, you reapply your sunscreen or your sunblock every 2 hours. If you’re going one ounce swimming, if you’re running around and sweating, make sure you get a water resistant or a waterproof sunscreen or sunblock itself. A T-shirt, you’re still blocking out 80% of the UV radiation. That’s cotton. But if you start talking about polyester, you look at the shirts on the thing, it says, oh, this is SPF 45. Polyester is going to be an SPF of 30 or plus. You know, some of those other more expensive shirts are more. But again, even walking 80% is better than nothing.”
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