Another anecdote. I’m 52, fair skinned, & blond (now mostly gray). I grew up on the beach in Southern California. I can recall getting a couple severe whole-body sunburns when I was a kid.
Every year since about age 30 I’ve had at least one basal cell carcinoma removed from somewhere. Had my last suspicious spot biopsied this week & am going back for excision next week. So far we’re swatting them before they really get going.
My brothers are the same.
We’re far from the whole story on skin cancers yet. There are weird risk factors: people who’ve had an organ transplant have a sky-high risk of all varieties, and people with chronic eczema have heightened risk as well. All carcinomas are more likely the more sun you’ve have (but especially sunburn) but melanoma isn’t conclusively linked with sun exposure, although it is somewhat linked to history of severe sunburn. Melanoma is also common on areas of the body that get little or no sun exposure (back of lower legs, ass, palms, soles of feet). And a recent study suggested people with melanoma have a higher survival rate the more sun exposure they’ve gotten in their lifetime.
Now there’s a lot of research on the importance vitamin D, the only good source of which is sun exposure, and only when the sun is close enough (not a very long time for those in Northern climes).
Based on everything we seem to know so far, I think it’s wise that I take care to get daily sun exposure all through the warm months in order to keep my D levels around 60 without supplementing. I take care never to burn, I do get a tan. And I wear a (highly rated) zinc oxide sunscreen if necessary. Now that there’s been more research on sunscreens, they don’t look so great either. There’s not enough regulation, most of them don’t work as advertised, few people use them correctly anyway, and some are implicated as containing ingredients known to contribute to cancers or speed their growth.
Three people I knew in school had skin cancers removed before age 18, but all of them were milk-white, basement-dwelling nerds who’d barely gotten any sun their whole lives.
None of my pale, freckly, often mole-y family (the oldest member of which will turn 100 next year) have had any skin cancers, despite living in the tropics for many years, enjoying outdoor activities, and rarely/never wearing sunscreen (although most of them are good at avoiding sunburn and cultivating a protective tan early in the season, due to growing up in Hawaii or having parents who did). I feel pretty safe continuing in their vein.
More anecdotal fun, yay - a doctor I used to work for was born in Brazil, and went back to Rio each year for Carnivale. Came back tanned like you wouldn’t believe. He retired in his late 60s, and died within a year of retirement, of a malignant melanoma that had spread from where it had developed on his skin.
And, I, from a pale mole-y family, have had moles showing precancerous changes removed in my 20s and 30s. I also played outside a lot as a kid.
in fact, melanoma is linked to sun exposure, though it’s not a straightforward dose-response relationship and genetic factors play an important part.
It is well accepted among skin and cancer specialists that too much sun will, in general heighten the risk of getting melanoma. There are a few who disagree and they’ve gotten disproportionate press coverage.
As to the most common skin cancers associated with getting too much sun, I see a ton of basal cell carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas in elderly people in my job as a pathologist. The vast majority of the time, their malignant biopsies/excisions also show features of uV damage from the sun - a change known as solar elastosis.
Anecdotes galor: Every person’s health is different too and different people have different reactions to the same thing…my grandma and her sister smoked, tanned, drank…it really took a toll on her sister’s health and appearance and her sister ended up dying relatively young for members of our family (mid 70s, so she still lived a decent amount of time, our relatives tend to drop off in their 90s though) and my grandma is still chugging along in her mid 80s having finally quit smoking and tanning in her 70s (I think a doctor told her that she was beginning to head the way of her sister).
Anyway, I think it was skin cancer that did the sister in, but I’m not 100% given everything else she was doing.
My mother had a melanoma. She had red hair and freckles. Her cancer surgeon at NYU said that the atmosphere had changed since WWII and the use of the A Bomb. That was his opinion on the increase in melanomas and that was back in 1960.
I’m not sure if the A bomb affected the health of people outside of Japan- or even the areas outside of of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Here’s a BBC article about it: BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Hiroshima health effects linger
The article doesn’t go into too much detail, but the effect of the radiation went way beyond skin cancers.
On the other hand, I come from a family of fair-skinned people, some of the redheads, and I can’t recall hearing about any of my blood relatives having any sort of skin cancer at all… but lest you think all is wonderful, about half my family dropped dead in their 40’s of cardiovascular disease. So… we don’t seem to get cancer no matter how long we live, but all too often we don’t live very long.
Clearly, it’s not just environment, there’s some interaction with the person, too. But we don’t entirely understand all the factors here.
The Cold War did a number on a lot of people’s heads around that time. 