Your Chances For Knowing If You’ll Get Getting Skin Cancer Is Just An Arm’s Length Away

Cancer of the skin is by far the most common of all cancers and the rates of Melanoma have been rising for at least 30 years. While Melanoma accounts for less than 2% of skin cancer cases, it causes the large majority of skin cancer deaths.

American Cancer Society’s estimates for melanoma in the United States for 2015:
• About 73,870 new melanomas will be diagnosed (about 42,670 in men and 31,200 in women).
• About 9,940 people are expected to die of melanoma (about 6,640 men and 3,300 women).

In general, if the cancer is found only in the part of the body where it started it is localized (sometimes referred to as stage 1). If it has spread to a different part of the body, the stage is regional or distant. The earlier melanoma of the skin is caught, the better chance a person has of surviving five years after being diagnosed. For melanoma of the skin, 84.0% are diagnosed at the local stage. The 5-year survival for localized melanoma of the skin is 98.3%.

And now there may be a quick way to assess your risk of getting skin cancer: just count the moles on your right arm.

Researchers say that people who have more than 11 moles on their right arm could have a higher risk of the disease. Researchers from the U.K.'s King's College looked at data from 3,594 female twins and compared their results against other studies involving men and women. They discovered that moles on the right arm were most predictive of how many moles were on the entire body, for example people with more than seven moles on their right arm had nine times the risk of having more than 50 on the whole body, while those with more than 11 were more likely to have more than 100.

Researchers conclude, "We demonstrated that arm mole count of more than 11 is associated with a significant risk of having more than 100 moles, that is in itself a strong predictor of risk of melanoma." (The Guardian)