Few people follow experts’ advice to regularly inspect their skin for signs of cancer, and even fewer do it thoroughly and accurately. But a new study suggests that a simple diagram of the body could help.
Researchers found that people who “mapped” their moles on a drawing of the torso were better able to catch new growths than their peers who relied on visual memory alone.
In this case, the new growths were merely computer manipulations of digital photographs of the study participants’ backs.
But in real life, a simple mole-mapping diagram could help people find melanoma early, according to Dr. Martin A. Weinstock, the study’s senior author.
The best way to detect melanoma is through regular, thorough self-exams of the skin, looking for new growths or changes in the size, shape or color of existing moles. But most people neither regularly nor thoroughly inspect their skin, Weinstock told Reuters Health.
“It’s there to see,” he said, “but you have to look, and you need to do it systematically.”
To help people do that, Weinstock and his colleagues at Brown University Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island, came up with the idea of “mole mapping” -- giving patients a simple drawing of the body on which they can mark the location of existing moles, then hopefully catch any new growths when they arise.
For the current study, reported in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, the researchers gave 88 men and women instructions on how to do a skin self-exam, then asked them all to perform one before a follow-up visit two weeks later.
Half of the study participants also received a diagram of the back to help them document their moles. The rest served as a comparison group.
When they returned for their follow-up visit, participants were shown digital photos of their backs that had been taken at their initial visit. They were told that some pictures had been manipulated and some had not; their task was to identify what, if any, changes had been made in each photo.
In the end, 52 percent of the diagram group correctly assessed their photos, versus 33 percent of the comparison group. In instances where a skin growth had been added to the photo, 60 percent of the diagram group caught it, while, again, only 33 percent of the comparison group gave an accurate judgment.
A thorough skin exam includes using full-length and hand mirrors to see the back of the body, and inspecting easily forgotten areas like the scalp, the soles of the feet and the skin between the toes.
Ideally, skin self-exams should be performed once a month, Weinstock said. When melanoma is caught in its earliest stages, he noted, the disease has a 95 percent survival rate. The survival odds plummet, however, once the cancer has spread to other parts of the body.
