Hispanic Teens Don’t Know Skin Cancer Risk

White Hispanic teens are more likely to use tanning beds and less likely to consider themselves at skin cancer risk, a survey of Florida students found.

Study leader Dr. Fangchao Ma of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and colleagues surveyed 369 Florida high school students — 221 white Hispanics and 148 white non-Hispanics — about their skin cancer knowledge, perceived risk and sun protection behaviors.

Compared with white non-Hispanic students, white Hispanic students were more likely to tan deeply.

The Hispanic teens were 60 percent less likely to have heard of skin self-examination and 70 percent less likely to have been told how to perform it, about 1.8 times as likely to never or rarely wear sun-protective clothing, about twice as likely to never or rarely use sunscreen and less likely to think they had an average or above-average risk for skin cancer

The findings were reported in the Archives of Dermatology.