April. 14, 2015 -- As a teen, Danielle Russo of Boston loved the tanned look, so she turned to indoor tanning beds to give her what she thought was a ''healthy glow.'' For several years, she went every day to tan, usually for 10 minutes. She cut back in her twenties but still went a couple times each month.
At 27, just months after Danielle got married, she gave in to her husband Derek’s pleas to get a troublesome mole on her stomach checked out. The mole had been there for years, and her family was also concerned about it. "It would peel off and flake off and bleed," she says.
Her doctor diagnosed her with the most deadly of skin cancers: melanoma. Even worse, it had spread to her lymph nodes. "Our first year of marriage was spent in hospitals, doctors' offices, The Cancer Center, at chemo treatments, and having numerous surgeries," she says.
She’s now in remission, but she has to go back to her oncologist every 3 months and to her doctor for skin checks every 6 months.
"You always think it can't happen to you, but it does," says Danielle, now 29. "I wish someone had told me when I was younger that tanning is not cute."
A Troubling Trend
Skin cancer, especially melanoma, is on the rise among young adults in the U.S.
While parents often warn their teens about the dangers of drinking and driving and having unsafe sex, the message about getting too much sun is often overlooked, experts say. Teenagers and young adults tend to think skin cancer is something that happens only to their parents or grandparents, says Anne Chapas, MD, a Manhattan dermatologist.
But she says doctors are finding that it doesn’t take these diseases a long time to show up.
Melanoma is one of the most common cancers in young adults, especially young women, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS). It’s the leading cause of cancer death in women ages 25 to 30, according to the Melanoma Research Foundation.
source : Skin Cancer: Young Adults Get It, Too
