Summer virtually arrives overnight in Montreal. One minute we’re shovelling the snow from our driveways, the next we are digging through our summer wardrobes. Unfortunately too few of us reach for the summer essentials—a hat, sunglasses and sunscreen. According to countless sun awareness campaigns, these three items are the key to reducing your risk of melanoma--the most deadly form of skin cancer.
By Ian Popple
Summer virtually arrives overnight in Montreal. One minute we’re shovelling the snow from our driveways, the next we are digging through our summer wardrobes. Unfortunately too few of us reach for the summer essentials—a hat, sunglasses and sunscreen. According to countless sun awareness campaigns, these three items are the key to reducing your risk of melanoma--the most deadly form of skin cancer.
Nearly 1000 people in Canada will die from melanoma this year, yet our fate is largely in our own hands. “Tanning is simply not a healthy activity,” says Dr. Beatrice Wang, Director of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) Melanoma Clinic. The sad thing is that most of us have known this for years, yet at the first sign of summer we ignore the advice of medical experts and scamper into the sun to bake. So why do we keep on doing it?
According to Dr. Wang one reason is that the negative effects of sun damage can take time to appear. “People tend not to adjust their behaviour until it’s too late,” she says. “It’s a similar situation to smoking--it often takes a health scare to bring home the dangers.” Incidentally, lung cancer and advanced melanoma have the worst prognoses of all cancers. “The chance of survival is poor,” says Dr. Wang. “What’s particularly frustrating as a physician is that these cancers are preventable in so many cases.”
According to recent data published by the Canadian Cancer Society, the worst sun-seekers are young women. Skin cancer is the eighth most common cancer in the Canadian population as a whole, but in young women it is the third most common, and in the UK it is number one. Even the onset of winter fails to curb the female appetite for tanning; reports suggest that more than 25 per cent of young women use tanning beds, which according to the Cancer Society can emit rays five times stronger than the midday sun. Dr. Wang’s own observations back up these findings. “At the MUHC melanoma clinic we are not only seeing more cases of cancer than ever before, but the patients we treat are getting younger,” she says. “A few years ago it was rare to see a patient in their twenties with melanoma, but it’s more common today.”
Montrealers are fortunate to have access to the most comprehensive melanoma clinic in North America right on their doorstep at the MUHC. The centre has specialists that treat a range of skin cancers, including ocular melanoma--a cancer of the eye commonly caused by sun damage. The group’s mission is also to discover new therapies for melanoma through strong clinical and research projects. “The important thing, however, is that people ensure they take the necessary precautions to protect themselves in the first place,” says Dr. Wang emphasizing a message that has remained constant for years: wear a hat, sunglasses and sunscreen. “It needs to become second nature--like gloves and a scarf in winter,” she says.
