These devices have been linked to the risk of skin cancer and are now also associated with lung cancer.
Sun beds have already been linked to an increased risk of suffering the most lethal type of skin cancer, but new research shows that it would also increase the chances of developing the most common form of skin disease.
Scientists at the Yale School of Public Health in Connecticut found that young people who tanned in sun beds were 69 percent more at risk of early-onset basal cell carcinoma (BCC).
“Artificial tanning was remarkably common in our study of young patients with skin cancer, especially in women, which would partially explain why 70 percent of early onset BCCs are in women,” Susan T said in a statement. Mayne, author of the study and professor at the School of Public Health.
The results, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology , support a previous investigation by the University of Minnesota in which experts discovered that people who used sun beds, no matter what type or for how long, were 74 percent more prone to developing melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer.
Mayne and her colleagues interviewed 750 people under 40. They analyzed the type of sun beds used, for how long they had been used and how often, the burns they had suffered and the age at which they had started using these tanning devices.
The team indicated that the risks increased with the number of years the sun beds had been used.
“We were also surprised to find that one third of our CCB participants had already had at least one other CCB before age 40, which is very alarming because skin cancers increase in frequency with age,” Mayne added.
Around 30 million people in the United States use sun beds, which the World Health Organization (WHO) qualifies as carcinogens for humans.
In the United States, sun beds are considered a medical device. The country’s health experts have urged that stronger regulations on its use be applied.
Cases of melanoma have been increasing in the last three decades and, although they only represent about 5 percent of skin cancers, they cause the majority of deaths from the disease. This year, 70,230 new cases will be diagnosed, according to the American Cancer Society.
Cases of basal cell cancer are also on the rise but are usually curable if they are detected and treated early.
“The important thing is that artificial tanning is a behavior that individuals can change,” said Leah M. Ferrucci, of the Yale School of Public Health and co-author of the research.
“Together with the findings on melanoma, our results for BCC indicate that reducing artificial tanning could result in a significant decrease in the incidence of these two types of skin cancer,” he added.