Caffeine may reduce risk of skin cancer

2009-02-27 20:37:35

BEIJING, Feb. 27 (Xinhuanet) --

Caffeine may prevent skin cancer because it disrupts a protein called ATR-Chkl that could cause the damaged cells become cancerous, says a leading U.S. researcher.

Dr. Paul Nghiem, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Washington in Seattle, said, "We have found what we believe to be the mechanism by which caffeine is associated with decreased skin cancer."

For the study, Nghiem's team looked at caffeine's effect on human skin cells in a laboratory that had been exposed to ultraviolet radiation. They found that in cells damaged by UV rays, caffeine interrupted ATR-Chk1, which caused the damaged cells to self-destruct. "Caffeine has no effect on undamaged cells," Nghiem said.

ATR is essential to damaged cells that are growing rapidly, Nghiem said, and caffeine specifically targets damaged cells that can become cancerous. "Caffeine more than doubles the number of damaged cells that will die normally after a given dose of UV," he said.

"This is a biological mechanism that explains what we have been seeing for many years from the oral intake of caffeine," he added.

But, Nghiem added, people shouldn't increase the amount of coffee or tea they drink to prevent skin cancer. "You are talking a lot of cups for a lot of years for a relatively small effect," he said. "But if you like it, it's another reason to drink it."

Nghiem has also been experimenting with applying caffeine directly to the skin. "It suppresses skin cancer development by as much as 72 percent in mice, and human studies are moving ahead slowly," he said.

It's possible that topical caffeine preparations might one day be used to help prevent skin cancer, Nghiem said. "Caffeine is both a sunscreen and it deletes damaged cells," he said. "It may well make sense to put it into a sunscreen preparation."

Dr. Robin Ashinoff, a dermatologist and clinical associate professor of dermatology at New York University's Langone Medical Center, however, thinks these findings need to be verified before they can have any clinical application.

(Agencies)

Editor: Huma Sheikh

More Americans develop skin cancer

2009-01-12 07:30:44

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) --

More Americans, particularly older men, have developed the deadly skin cancer melanoma, a new study showed.

The rate is increasing among all Americans and cannot be due to better screening alone, researchers at the Stanford University Medical Center (SUMC) said in the study published in the Jan. issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

The rise in melanoma cases could indicate an epidemic of skin cancer, the researchers warned.

"Melanoma rates are still going up, especially among older white men," said lead researcher Dr. Eleni Linos, from the dermatology department at SUMC. "This calls for greater awareness for patients, their families and physicians."

The researchers based their study on data from the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program to identify new cases of melanoma between 1992 and 2004. During that period, 70,596 cases of melanoma were diagnosed among non-Hispanic whites in the United States, a 3.1-percent increase a year, the study said.

The increased rate was for all types of melanoma and for all thickness of tumors, said the study.

Moreover, the rate of melanoma doubled in all socioeconomic groups, while deaths from the disease did not increase significantly, according to the study.

While blaming tanning for a major cause, the researchers called for strengthening public education to discourage people from too much tanning.

Editor: Zhang Mingyu

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