Indoor tanning 101

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Indoor tanning isn’t something you’d expect to see in the course catalog, but it’s available to a lot of college students. Researcher Sherry Pagoto of the University of Massachusetts Medical School found this by surveying the locations of tanning beds in or near the top 125 colleges listed by U.S. News and World Report. She says almost half had indoor tanning somewhere:

“Twelve percent of top colleges and universities around the country have tanning beds on campus. In 42 percent of the colleges, we found tanning beds in off-campus housing.”

Tanning bed use raises the risk of skin cancer, including the most deadly form, melanoma.

The study in the journal JAMA Dermatology was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Learn more at healthfinder.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.