By 2050, the death rates from malignant melanoma will have decreased from their current levels, but the number of people dying from the disease will have increased due to the ageing population.
However, if new treatments for the deadly skin cancer prove to be effective, the number of deaths could fall too, according to research presented at the European Cancer Congress 2017.
Ms Alice Koechlin, from the International Prevention Research Institute in Lyon, France, told the meeting that people who were at highest risk of dying from melanoma were those born between 1900 and 1960 when not only were the dangerous effects of exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation from sunlight largely unknown, but health professionals also believed that sunshine was positively beneficial.
Ms Koechlin concluded: “Our findings clearly show that most of the death toll due to melanoma has been caused by medicallybacked exposures to highly carcinogenic UV radiation between 1900 and 1960. They also show that UV-protection of children pays off because rates of melanoma death keep going down, from around 1960 to the current day as the UV protection of children based on clothing, shading and avoidance of excessive sun exposure has spread in most lightskinned populations, starting in Australia.
“Skin screening, based on the opportunistic early detection of skin cancers, does not affect melanoma mortality and our analyses confirm this evidence. So, generations that have been over-exposed to high UV doses keep the high probability of developing a deadly melanoma at some stage in their lives. The good news is that the risk declines rapidly as skin protection increases, and that effective treatments are starting to be available. But we still have a long way to go before we will have affordable therapies able to prolong survival from advanced melanoma by several years with a decent quality of life.”
Chair of the Congress and president of ECCO, Professor Peter Naredi, from the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who was not involved with the research, commented: “This study by Autier and colleagues is very interesting. Malignant melanoma is one of our most common cancers and we have tried different ways to increase awareness about protection and early diagnosis. If the predictions are right, protection from sun exposure is one of the best examples of primary prevention and this study proves all efforts to protect a population from unhealthy amounts of sun exposure are worthwhile.”
