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Last year the @TODAYshow said I was wrong about sunscreen and skin cancer in Black people. Here is our latest publication in @JAMADerm showing why I was right.
Let me explain.... https://twitter.com/AdeAdamson/status/1156713820653359104
Let me explain.... https://twitter.com/AdeAdamson/status/1156713820653359104
It all started with this article I wrote in the @washingtonpost challenging the idea that sunscreen would have saved Bob Marley who died of melanoma on his foot. https://twitter.com/adeadamson/status/1133089255465607169
People seemed to be blown away by the assertion and it ended up getting picked up by the NYTimes here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/us/black-skin-sunscreen.html
This is when it made its way onto the Today Show where my assertions were challenged. This was a missed opportunity to educate the public by folks at the Today show! I decided to get a team together and look into all the evidence related to UV exposure and melanoma
We looked at ALL the literature related to UV exposure and melanoma published in the English language and found 13 studies that met our inclusion criteria.
Only 2 of the eleven studies showed any association of UV exposure and melanoma in people broadly defined as having skin of color.
One of those studies only showed an association in Black men. But in that same study showed NO association in any other group...not even in white people, the group in which the association has been consistently shown! see: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/480678
The other study showing an association was among Hispanic men in Chile based on latitude within the country. A major caveat is that in the city with highest number of melanomas is also home to a lot of Chileans of Croatian descent (i.e. white)
Bottom line: The link between UV exposure and melanoma in people of darker skin types likely does NOT exist. Stop the fearmongering.
Now anybody that comes at me with this nonsense, I can point them to our paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/10.1001/jamadermatol.2020.4616
I could not have done this without a fantastic team which include @FabiLopes_Derm and @marcsleiman1 and others.
If you want more details check out the podcast about this new paper where I was interviewed by the legendary @MishaRosenbach : https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-player/18569296
