Word: melanoma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...alarming rate. The American Cancer Society predicts that in the U.S. this year, more than 600,000 new cases of skin malignancies will be diagnosed, most of them caused by excessive exposure to ultraviolet rays from the sun. Some 27,600 of those cases will be malignant melanoma, the deadliest type, which has been increasing 7% annually over the past decade and will kill 6,300 people this year. Most of the other skin cancers will be basal-cell and squamous-cell carcinomas, less lethal but still dangerous if not treated in time. Some 2,500 victims of these cancers...
Doctors are particularly struck by the rise in melanoma cases. "When I went into practice 25 years ago," says Dr. Henriette Abel, "if I saw one melanoma a year, it was a big deal." This year, however, "there was a period when I saw six in six weeks." Her brother Dr. Robert Abel, with whom she shares a dermatology practice in Elizabeth, N.J., now diagnoses an average of one melanoma case a month...
...skin are cumulative and usually require years of exposure before malignancy begins, the results are just showing up now. The Harvard Medical School Health Letter has neatly summarized the situation: "The bronzed youth of the baby boom, now reaching middle age, are in the vanguard of the melanoma plague...
...most fearsome form of skin cancer is malignant melanoma, which sometimes emerges from an existing mole or simply appears in an area of previously unblemished skin. Melanomas are asymmetrically shaped, usually begin as mottled light brown or black blotches that eventually can turn red, white or blue in spots, become crusty and bleed. They grow rapidly, and once they have expanded to about the thickness of a dime, they have probably metastasized and become lethal...
Here too the sun's ultraviolet radiation plays a role, but apparently a different one. Many melanoma victims have had three or more episodes of severe sunburn and blistering, usually as children or teenagers. Those experiences seem to set off a still mysterious process that results in the development of melanomas years later, often on parts of the body seldom exposed to the sun. Some evidence also exists that heredity plays a more important role in melanoma than in other skin cancers...