Mayo Dermatology\u2019s baseless attack on indoor tanning this week is predicated entirely on one small Minnesota county that averaged just 1 melanoma a year in women 18-39 in the 1970s \u2014 as small a sample as is statistically possible for comparison.<\/p>\n
Olmsted County, Minnesota \u2014 a county of 144,000 that is home to the Mayo Clinic \u2014 now diagnoses about 9 melanomas a year in women 18-39, an increase Mayo calls 8-fold after adjusting for the increased population. Even worse, in promoting its one-county study, Mayo suggested that increase \u2014 measured in a county with 15 times more dermatologists-per-capita than the national average \u2014 is somehow more accurate than the much-larger National Cancer Institute national database, which did not show that increase.<\/p>\n
By saying 1 case increased to 9 over a 40-year span, they convinced the American news media to run with the story anyway this week. And they did \u2013 as if this study were a national database with large numbers. Headlines suggested that \u201cMelanoma cases rising \u2013 young women at greatest risk.\u201d (The Detroit Free Press)<\/p>\n
That\u2019s NOT what the study said. The study alleged an increase in women \u2014 but even Mayo admitted that melanoma is STILL much more common in men than in women, and that older men are most at risk. But that\u2019s NOT what they led reporters write this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey shoved the term \u20188-fold increase\u2019 down reporters throats and didn\u2019t explain that \u20188-fold\u2019 meant increasing from 1 case to 9 cases total in an entire county, and that there wasn\u2019t an increase in thick lesions in that county or that mortality rates actually declined in that county, which isn\u2019t possible if incidence truly is increasing,\u201d Smart Tan Executive Director Joseph Levy said. \u201cThat entire 40-year increase is predicated on that county generating less than one more melanoma case a month over a 40-year period. And there were 68 dermatologists doing it. Increased detection, and not increase in disease, is so obviously the default explanation for what happened in Olmsted and why it didn\u2019t actually happen in the rest of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
It gets worse. Mayo didn\u2019t bother to report that in 1970 that county detected less than half than the national average for melanomas in women \u2014 about 5.4 per 100,000 verses about 11 per 100,000 nationwide. Olmsted\u2019s rates were LOWER than the rest of the nation. When you start from a lower baseline and you begin DETECTING more aggressively, and you have 15 times more dermatologists per capita DOING that detection, that\u2019s one way to suggest that there\u2019s a bigger increase.<\/p>\n
It gets STILL worse. Mayo didn\u2019t bother to discuss that its data show no measurable increase in THICK melanomas in the 40 years in the study. There weren\u2019t ANY in that category in the 1970s. There were just 2 in the last decade, which is actually a big reduction from the 1990s, when they found 5 in 10 years.<\/p>\n
Mayo didn\u2019t bother to tell you that the dermatology community worldwide has written that you can\u2019t have an ACTUAL increase in disease if all you are detecting is an increase in THIN lesions that you didn\u2019t used to even find. That\u2019s the subject of peer-reviewed studies in the past two years in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and the British Journal of Dermatology.<\/p>\n
All of that on top of the errors we\u2019ve documented in the past two days. That the National Cancer Institute’s data don\u2019t suggest what Mayo alleges. That Dermatology itself attacked Mayo for a similar paper in 2005. And that the rest of the world\u2019s melanoma data don\u2019t match Mayo\u2019s.<\/p>\n
The story keeps getting worse. As does Mayo Dermatology\u2019s academic integrity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mayo Dermatology\u2019s baseless attack on indoor tanning this week is predicated entirely on one small Minnesota county that averaged just 1 melanoma a year in women 18-39 in the 1970s \u2014 as small a sample as is statistically possible for comparison. Olmsted County, Minnesota \u2014 a county of 144,000 that is home to the Mayo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n