Skin cancer may increase risk of other cancers

The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, looked at 769 people in a cohort who had been diagnosed with non-melanoma skin cancer during a 16 year follow up from 1989. They also looked at 18 405 people who had no history of this disease over the same period and compared the risk of developing other cancers in the two groups.

They found that there were 293 cancer cases per 10 000 person years in the non-melanoma skin cancer group compared with nearly 78 per 10 000 person years in the group without the disease. After adjusting for other factors known to be cancer risk factors, they found that people with non-melanoma skin cancer were twice as likely as other people to develop other cancers. The figures were the same for basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, the two main types of non-melanoma skin cancer.