Marathoners Risk More Skin Cancers
Posted: November 21, 2006
Marathon runners can be proud of their stamina, but all that time outdoors boosts their risk of skin cancer, including the potentially deadly malignant melanoma, according to a study in the Archives of Dermatology.
"We are the first to report this," researcher Christina M. Ambros-Rudolph, MD, tells WebMD in an e-mail interview.
Ambros-Rudolph is a consultant dermatologist at the Medical University of Graz, Austria.
She and her co-researchers, all runners, conducted the study after caring for eight ultra-marathon runners with malignant melanoma over the past decade.
Comparing Runners and Nonrunners