Melanoma patients 'at higher risk'
Updated on 07 January 2009
People suffering from skin cancer have a higher chance of developing another type of cancer, researchers have said.
Experts at Queen's University Belfast found that those being treated for the disease could be more than twice as likely to get another cancer compared with the general population.
Previous studies have shown that people suffering from one cancer are at higher risk of developing another.
Researchers for the study, published in the British Journal of Cancer, decided to focus their attention just on people with skin cancer.
They analysed data from the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry (NICR) for between 1993 and 2002, including 20,823 people treated for non-melanoma skin cancer and 1,837 people with melanoma.
Compared with the general population, people with non-melanoma skin cancer were up to 57% more likely to develop another type of cancer. They were almost twice as likely to go on to develop melanoma and had an increased risk of smoking-related cancers.
The risk was much higher in those who had had squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) than those who had basal cell carcinoma (BCC).
Among those with melanoma, the risk of developing another cancer was more than double.
In this research, patients developed another cancer that was unrelated to the first. This is different from when cancer spreads to other parts of the body (metastatic cancer).
Malignant melanoma, also known as melanoma, is the most serious type of skin cancer and every year in the UK, more than 9,500 people are diagnosed with it and more than 2,000 people die.
These news feeds are provided by an independent third party and Channel 4 is not responsible or liable to you for the same.
