Here's something to ponder as you strip down for the beach this weekend: A study suggests women are better than men at spotting the skin cancer melanoma on themselves.
That may be one reason women have a lower death rate from melanoma, researchers said.Sixty-six percent of female melanoma patients in the study had found their own cancerous lesions, vs. 42 percent for men.
Melanoma, which is thought to come from too much sun, is highly curable if found early but more dangerous if overlooked and allowed to progress.
"Men may be less skin-conscious than women are, or perhaps less prevention-conscious than women are, (or maybe) they're less into seeing physicians for suspected lesions than a woman might be," said the study's lead author, Dr. Howard Koh.
He stressed that those explanations and any link to women's higher survival rate are "highly speculative." Nor has it been proved that women's higher survival rate results from biological differences between the sexes, he said.
Koh, an associate professor of dermatology, medicine and public health at the Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health, reports the study with colleagues in the June issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
The results suggest that public education and screening efforts for melanoma should aim particularly at men and at body areas not easily seen, such as the back, the researchers said.
Melanoma is expected to strike 32,000 Americans this year and cause 6,700 deaths. Its lesions are irregularly shaped marks that have mixed shades of tan, brown and black, sometimes with dashes of red, white or blue. They are usually bigger in diameter than a pencil eraser.
Dr. Darrell Rigel, associate professor of dermatology at New York University, agreed that women are "much more aware about their skin" and better at spotting melanoma, and that this may contribute to their higher survival rate.
But he said other factors appear to be at work, too.
Men tend to show up at a doctor's office with thicker and more advanced melanoma lesions, he said.
Rigel said on average, about 85 percent of women are alive 10 years after a melanoma diagnosis, compared with about 75 percent for men.