100% protection?
The Herald tells us
Sunscreen provides 100 per cent protection against all three types of skin cancer and also safeguards a so-called superhero gene, a new study has found.
That sounds dramatic, and you might wonder how this 100% protection was demonstrated.
The study involved conducting a series of skin biopsies on 57 people before and after UV exposure, with and without sunscreen.
There isn’t any link to the research or even the name of the journal, but the PubMed research database suggests that this might be it, which is confirms by the QUT press release. The researcher name matches, and so does the number of skin biopsies. They measured various types of cellular change in bits of skin exposed to simulated solar UV light, at twice the dose needed to turn the skin red, and found that sunscreen reduced the changes to less than the margin of error. This looks like good quality research, and it indicates that sunscreen definitely will give some protection from melanoma, but 100% must be going too far given the small sample and moderate UV dose.
I was a also bit surprised by the “so-called superhero gene”, since I’d never seen p53 described that way before. It’s n0t just me: Google hasn’t seen that nickname either, except on copies of this story.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »