Skin cancer sun bed risk ‘for 250,000 children’

A quarter of a million children in England are at risk from skin cancer due to their use of sun beds, researchers have warned.

In a letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Catherine Thomson from Cancer Research UK and Professor Chris Twelves from Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine and St James’s University Hospital in Leeds, stated that sun beds raise serious issues.

Ms Thomson and Professor Twelves point to two studies, recently carried out by Cancer Research UK, involving over 9,000 children aged 11-17 in England.

The first study, a national prevalence study of 3,101 individuals, found six per cent of 11-17 year olds had utilised a sun bed, the average age of first use being just 14.

The research also found supervision of sun bed use was poor.

Nationally, of those children who used sunbeds, 23.2 per cent did so at home. The remaining three-quarters had used tanning salons or leisure centres, where more than one in five were unsupervised.