Sunscreen

I had been tracking down headlines and research articles to bring you news about a study that comes to us from Australia and relates to skin cancer.  Unfortunately, though the research is said to be posted on line in the December 6th issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, I cannot locate anything past December 1st and I just have to move on to other activities tonight.

The study has some quality measures. It followed people over time and then verified a specific outcome in the two groups.  The groups were similar in make up but may have practiced two different health behaviors.  The purpose was to determine if daily use of sunscreen on head, neck, arms and hands would decrease the incidence of melanomas.  

The population size was good -1600 people who live in Australia.  The issue I have is that the "control" group was told to use sunscreen however they decided to use it, if at all. 
The researchers then followed up each year with questionnaires. 

Without seeing the actual research study I can't make any inference on causation.  Well, I expect that the conclusion will just be that people who used sunscreen daily had less skin cancer than those who did not.  I think we know that we should wear sunscreen.  The type of study does not allow us to say using sunscreen every day will prevent skin cancer.

My biggest concern is whether or not the control group was educated on preventing skin cancer.  It is like the opposite of what we usually worry about in clinical drug trials.  We worry about the side effects for the treatment group (taking the drug) but here I worry about the group that was considered the control group.  This feels like telling a group to smoke as much as they like while we tell another group not to smoke at all and then wait to see if the ones who do not smoke get cancer.  We will say that there was much less cancer in the non smokers, but we put the others at great risk.

WHAT?

Here is a link to a website I do trust and they give an overview of the study which was conducted by researcher Adele Green.