What Former Miss Maryland Brittany Cicala Wishes She Had Done To Prevent Skin Cancer
Brittany Cicala was crowned Miss Maryland in 2006. (Photo: Facebook/Brittany Cicala)
Brittany Cicala, Miss Maryland 2006, was diagnosed with melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer, when she was just 20 years old. “I am a survivor of a cancer that I could have avoided — if I had only avoided indoor tanning,” she recently wrote in an editorial for the Baltimore Sun.
Cicala first visited a tanning salon before her senior prom, she writes. Soon enough, she was sometimes going seven days a week.
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The pageant winner was diagnosed with melanoma in 2005, after her mother pointed out a dark mole on her back. But she didn’t do anything at first. “After all, young people feel invincible,” writes Cicala, now a registered nurse and mother of two. But a week later, it bled, and she visited a dermatologist for an evaluation. The mole — which, sure enough, was melanoma — was removed, leaving Cicala with a 7-inch scar. Since then, she has undergone numerous surgeries for other precancerous areas.
“If I hadn’t had the ability to get an indoor tan, I probably never would have developed melanoma,” she says in the editorial.
You can read Cicala’s full editorial in the Baltimore Sun here.
Maryland is currently considering a bill that would prohibit minors from indoor tanning. Similar measures have been voted down in the state over previous years.
Nearly a dozen states have placed age restrictions on indoor tanning. In addition, 11 European countries, Brazil, and a majority of Australian states also prevent minors from the practice. And not surprisingly, research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that females under age 18 are less likely to go indoor tanning within states that have such restriction.
A nationwide study of tanning bed use among high school students, published in JAMA Dermatology, reported that approximately 30 percent of non-Hispanic white female students went indoor tanning in 2011. Research also shows that only about 40 percent of adolescents use sun protection.
“It’s difficult for teenagers to grasp the danger of tanning,” Cicala, who has also testified before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, writes in the editorial. “It is difficult to comprehend that skin cancer is a very real cancer. It’s much easier to think, ‘It will never happen to me.” In 2014, the FDA started requiring a black-box warning on UV lamps that they were not intended for use by people under age 18.
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Skin cancer is one of the most common cancers in America, affecting one in five Americans. Nearly 10,000 people will die from melanoma in 2015, according to research estimates. Using a tanning bed 10 times or more increases the risk for melanoma by 34 percent, versus never going indoor tanning, according to a 2014 study.
According to a research analysis published in BMJ, just one session of indoor tanning raises the risk of developing melanoma by 20 percent. And people who start using tanning beds before age 35 have a 59 percent increased risk of melanoma, the same study reports.
Indoor tanning is not safer than tanning outdoors, the CDC cautions. Tanning bulbs deliver cancer-causing UV rays to the skin just like direct sun exposure. In fact, one minute in a tanning bed can be twice as cancerous as the same amount of time spent in the midday Mediterranean sun, the Skin Cancer Foundation reports. And research estimates that about 170,000 new cases of non-melanoma skin cancer can be attributed to tanning beds every year.
Cicala admits in the editorial: “What I thought was a ‘healthy glow’ was far from healthy.”
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