Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has some guidelines on proper safety precautions for indoor tanning, those aren’t enforced by states if the state government doesn’t pass its own regulations, researchers explained.
Missouri is one of 17 states without any age or safety restrictions on indoor tanning – a trend that has become increasingly popular, and some say addictive, among young women.
“It’s not just, ‘I’m going to look good for the prom.’ It’s something that’s a very common practice among lots of kids, particularly Caucasian girls,” said Dr. Sophie J. Balk, an attending pediatrician at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in Bronx, New York.
“Teenagers in general, particularly the younger ones, may not understand the risk,” Balk, who co-wrote a commentary published with the new study, told Reuters Health.
“It is a cumulative effect,” said Dr. Brundha Balaraman, who led the new study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “The younger you start, the more damage you accrue.”
She and her colleagues made calls to hundreds of indoor tanning facilities in the state to inquire about teen tanning. In total, they talked to operators at 243 facilities, twice each.
Just under two-thirds of operators said their facility would allow kids as young as 10 or 12 to tan, sometimes without parental consent. Forty-three percent of them claimed there were no risks tied to indoor tanning, and 80 percent said tanning could prevent future sunburns, the research team wrote Monday in Pediatrics.
Single facilities often provided inconsistent
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