Source: Dermatology Daily
“Reuters (4/21, Steenhuysen) reports that, according to studies published in the April issue of the Archives of Dermatology, men over the age of 40 should visit their physician to check for signs of melanoma. Physicians can detect melanomas at an early stage when they are easier to treat. This is important, because death rates from melanoma are increasing, particularly in among middle-aged and older men.
For the first study, Susan M. Swetter, MD, of Stanford University, and colleagues “interviewed 227 men aged 40 and older within three months after they had been diagnosed with melanoma,” HealthDay (4/20, Edelson) explained. “A quarter of them had tumors more that two millimeters thick — about a third of the thickness of a pencil eraser, but enough to mark a dangerous borderline for effective treatment.” The team “found that men whose melanomas were detected by physicians tended to be older, and that 46 percent of the physician-detected melanomas were on the back.” In an accompanying editorial, June K. Robinson, MD, of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, pointed out that “detecting a melanoma early, while it is thin, is an essential first step in surviving the skin cancer.”
WebMD (4/20, Warner) added that “a second analysis ” demonstrated that “physician detection of melanomas is most common among men over 65, men with a history of atypical moles, or men with cancers in areas they can’t see, like their backs.” Specifically, the investigators “found that men whose melanomas were detected by a doctor tended to be older (57 percent were 65 or older compared with 42 percent of those who detected the cancer themselves and 34 percent whose melanoma was detected by someone else).” The authors theorized that “older men tend to visit their doctor more frequently than younger men. They may also have poorer eyesight for self-detection and are less likely to have a partner to look at their skin.”
