Sun Protection Tips to Lower Skin Cancer Risk

There are three main types of skin cancer: basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma. The first two are the most common. They usually aren’t fatal but can be disfiguring if not removed. Melanoma can be deadly, but is very treatable when caught early.

These cancers can appear in many guises and are easy to overlook. “I tell patients to look out for the ‘ugly duckling,’ the spot that stands out and doesn’t look like anything else on your body,” Connolly says. “It could be a new mole, something that looks like a pimple but won’t go away, or a spot that is bleeding or not healing.”

Have anything that’s new or looks suspicious checked by a dermatologist as soon as possible to determine if the growth is cancerous. The sooner skin cancer is diagnosed, the more easily and effectively it can be treated.

“Finding basal and squamous cell cancers when they’re small sometimes means we can treat them without surgery,” says Rebecca Hartman, MD, director of melanoma epidemiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Nonsurgical treatments include cryotherapy and chemotherapy creams.

“Even melanoma has a nearly 98 percent survival rate when we catch it at a small, localized stage,” she says. Advanced cases are also becoming more treatable, thanks to recent developments in targeted therapy (which goes after specific genes) and immune therapy (which drives the immune system to seek and destroy melanoma cells).