Who Gets Skin Cancer?

Featuring Dr. Jan Peter Dank, MD, Dermatologist

Duration: 1 minute, 1 second     

For the risk of skin cancer, skin color matters.

Lighter-skinned people get more skin cancers than darker-skinned people. For non-melanoma skin cancer, the damage that creates the skin cancer is often done at an early age, but the skin cancers tend to come later in age. 

Most are going to come after the age of 50. For melanoma, however, they can come at almost any age. So we rarely see melanoma in children, but starting in teenage years, all the way up to your 90s, you can get a melanoma. 

And that’s an unusual pattern for a cancer. Most cancer's risk goes way up over the age of 50 or 60. But for melanoma, we see them in not too different numbers in people in their 20s to people in their 70s.  

And that means that a lot of young people die of melanoma compared to other types of cancer. So, melanoma is usually ranked in the top two causes of cancer death in people in their 20s.  

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Presenter: Dr. Jan Peter Dank, Dermatologist, Bellingham, WA

Local Practitioners: Dermatologist