Education program improves melanoma screening

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Public education efforts to raise awareness of the risk factors for malignant melanoma, along with improved access to screening exams, can improve melanoma screening rates among men 50 years of age and older, new research suggests.

The findings, which will appear in the medical journal Cancer, are based on a study of more than 400 men living in 18 communities in Queensland, Australia.

Nine of the communities were assigned to a 3-year intervention that included community and physician education campaigns as well as the establishment of clinics dedicated to skin screening. The other nine communities received no intervention.

Two years after the start of the program, men were four-times more likely than before to report having a clinical whole-body skin examination in the preceding 12 months, and they were twice as likely to have performed whole-body skin self-examination.

Men 50 years of age or older accounted for 20 percent of screening visits at the clinic but they yielded 48 percent of the melanomas diagnosed, report Dr. Monika Janda of the Queensland Cancer Fund in Spring Hill, Australia and colleagues.

"The intervention program successfully motivated men aged at least 50 years to attend screening for skin cancer, resulting in the highest yield of skin cancer within this subgroup of the population," the team concludes.

Meanwhile, in the same issue of Cancer, Dr. Alan C. Geller, from Boston University, and colleagues describe an initiative to improve early detection and prevention practices among siblings of melanoma patients.

Some 400 siblings were randomly assigned to "usual care" or to an intervention that included personalized telephone counseling, the use of computer-generated educational materials, and linkage to free screening programs.

At 12-month follow-up, those who received the intervention were 76 percent more likely than usual-care siblings to examine all moles, including those found on the back. The rates of skin cancer examination, although not different between the groups, more than doubled during the course of the study. Similarly, two thirds of the subjects in each group reported routine use of sunscreen at follow-up.

"Diagnosis of melanoma in a family member provides an important opportunity to intervene with others in that family," the researchers state.

They conclude: "This intervention may provide a useful foundation for future efforts to target the more than half million siblings at risk for melanoma, a lethal but preventable disease."

SOURCE: Cancer, August 15, 2006.