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    Sunscreen's War On Women?
    By Hank Campbell | March 26th 2012 09:22 PM | 11 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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    About Hank

    I'm the founder of Science 2.0® and co-author of "Science Left Behind".

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    Do you use sunscreen?  If not, you aren't as crazy as those anti-science hippies who are trying to give their kids smallpox or starve poor nations, but you are not exactly up on the literature of the last 30 years either.

    However, you may be no worse off, especially if you are a woman who might like to keep her uterus working. The uterus - that special place where a baby grows(1) when a woman gets pregnant - can sometimes have its tissue misplaced.  That's called endometriosis and it is when the tissue that normally lines the uterus is instead growing somewhere else. It can lead to heavy periods and even infertility.  While researchers know what it is, they don't really know why it happens.

    But they think they may have one reason why. Endometriotic lesions have been correlated to estrogen levels so researchers recently investigated endometriosis instances related to endocrine-disrupting compounds, including the benzophenone-containing compounds in...sunscreens. Yes, sunscreen, the stuff we are all told to slather on lest we get skin cancer.

    They used urine samples from 625 women.  They found that women with higher concentrations of the sunscreen agent 2,4-dihydroxybenzophenone, had a significantly greater rate of endometriosis than those with low concentrations.  There was no connection with other compounds.

    Correlation in this case is really, really not causation so no one should throw out their sunscreen and sunbathe naked just yet. It may just be better not to spend a lot of time in the sun if you can avoid it.

    Citation: Tatsuya Kunisue, Zhen Chen, Germaine Buck Louis, Rajeshwari Sundaram, Mary Hediger, Liping Sun, and Kurunthachalam Kannan, 'Urinary Concentrations of Benzophenone-type UV Filters in US Women and Their Association with Endometriosis', Environ. Sci. Technol., Just Accepted Manuscript DOI: 10.1021/es204415a

    H/T Sunscreen Compound Linked To Endometriosis by Janet Pelley Chemical&Engineering News

    NOTE:

    (1) Sorry, fetus. I think only Republican women get pregnant with babies?

    Comments

    The Stand-Up Physicist
    I spend all my time in the basement, at night. I even figured out how to spend the daytime hours at night.  While I don't need SPFJX 60, I still use it here in the cave.  Women don't visit my cave, go figure.  I thought for sure I had a wife and child, but I seem to have misplaced them with the car keys (OK, they are sleeping).
    Doug Sweetser | 03/26/12 | 23:44 PM
    Can you post actual numbers or real Data?? Wtf is "significantly"?? Cmon is this a science article or an art one?

    Anonymous (not verified) | 03/26/12 | 23:48 PM
    Hank
    I don't think it has much value just to paste their study results but if it helps; "2OH-4MeO-BP, 2,4OH-BP, and 4OH-BP, respectively, were detected in 99.0%, 93.3%, and 83.8% of the urine samples analyzed, whereas the detection rates for 2,2’,4,4’OH-BP and 2,2’OH-4MeO-BP were below 6.0%. "
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    Hank Campbell | 03/27/12 | 00:08 AM
    "Do you use sunscreen? If not" ... "you are not exactly up on the literature of the last 30 years either."

    Come on - less than 10,000 Americans die every year from skin cancer. This really is a small number in comparison to the estimated increase in fatalities linked to vitamin D deficiency. And the number of people dying from skin cancer hasn't gone down even though it seems just about everyone uses sun screen. I think sun screen usage just doesn't do that much good unless you are going to be exposed to a LOT of sun (ie, you are a lifeguard at the beach). That just isn't the case for most people.

    Bob K (not verified) | 05/13/12 | 14:44 PM
    Hank
    I agree that there is a certain amount of scare journalism about the sun - but your assertion that more people die from vitamin D deficiency due to not being in the sun is just silly.
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    Hank Campbell | 05/13/12 | 16:37 PM
    I'm not sure what you find silly about it. Because people don't die directly from vitamin D deficiency? How many peole die from nicotine overdose? Doesn't mean smoking doesn't kill people. Several epidemiological papers have been written to this affect, one showing that vitamin D deficiency literally DOUBLES the rate of death from virtually all causes (cancer, infection, heart disease). I've yet to see a paper that states, "vitamin D deficiency isn't a problem in the US and people who are deficient are just as healthy as those who aren't". Surely that isn't what you are claiming... 10,000 people a year really is a small number for the attention it gets. You really think vitamin D deficiency which is occurring at a rate of around 75% (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-deficiency-un...) wouldn't account for more than 10,000 deaths per year (ie about 1 in 22,500 people who are vitamin D deficient)? Estimates I've seen are more around 200-300,000 per year!

    Bob K (not verified) | 05/15/12 | 13:42 PM
    Hank
     Because people don't die directly from vitamin D deficiency?
    Well, yeah.  You don't seem to understand what the word 'cause' is.  Using your 'system variables' belief, I can claim honey kills more people than cigarettes - all I have to do is create chain of events and match the two curves.  The Institute of Medicine says 10% of people may be deficient in vitamin D - and no idea if that harms them or not, since they don't all get ricketts from it - while you claim 75% of people are deficient because you want to believe it and it is killing them.

    I'm not recommending people go get all leathery in the sun, and I don't insist my kids get slathered in chemicals before they go play outside, but claiming vitamin D deficiency causes more deaths than car crashes, heart attacks and suicides combined each year is goofy.


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    Hank Campbell | 05/15/12 | 13:58 PM
    Gerhard Adam
    ...10,000 people a year really is a small number for the attention it gets. You really think vitamin D deficiency which is occurring at a rate of around 75%...
    That isn't what the article says.  The article says that more people have become deficient over the past 20 years and that 50-75 % of THAT change was due to a change in testing.
    That earlier study, co-authored by Picciano, also found that vitamin D deficiency had become more common between the late 1980s and 2004, but that between half and 75 percent of that difference was due to changes in the test used to measure those blood levels and therefore wasn’t a true gauge. "The results are far overstated and their findings are not as accurate as ours," Picciano says. "There is some deficiency — I don't want to minimize that — but it's not as high as they're saying."
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-deficiency-united-states
    Gerhard Adam | 05/15/12 | 14:22 PM
    "Three-quarters of U.S. teens and adults are deficient in vitamin D, the so-called "sunshine vitamin" whose deficits are increasingly blamed for everything from cancer and heart disease to diabetes, according to new research. "

    50% of 75% = 37.5%. 25% of 75% = 18.75%

    Bob K (not verified) | 05/15/12 | 14:37 PM
    True, cause and effect hasn't been proven, but sometimes the data is so outrageously onesided (in the sense that people with vitamin D deficiency sure do happen to die a LOT more than people who without it) that it is pretty tough to justify your position. Maybe having an increased propensity to die from heart disease, autoimmune disease, infection, cancer, etc happens to lie in a gene that just so happens to also cause erroneous vitamin D test results, but it seems like specious logic to me. I think one of the BIG reasons for the 10% number is the fact that what is considered "low" is changing BECAUSE of these new studies that are showing such large increases in mortality to those with certain vitamin D levels. Most of the papers I've read over the past 5 years have put the cut off of low vs normal (ie, the cutoff for increased mortality) at nearly 4 times the number used to get "10%". But even if it is only 10%, we are talking about 30 million people in the US. 10,000 a year is only 1 in 3000 people with a vitamin D deficiency dying every year. I think vitamin D deficiency is a bit more serious than that (as are most vitamin deficiencies). If vitamin D deficiency causes an increase in mortality from heart disease or infection, how could you think 10,000 is too many? More than that die from influenza every year. I'm curious if you've reviewed the literature on this lately, because it seems most people in the field are in agreement that vitamin D deficiency is much more serious than we though 10 years ago (with regard to health). Just because there is one remaining skeptic (there always is) doesn't mean the last man standing is right.

    Bob K (not verified) | 05/15/12 | 14:34 PM
    Here is a little exercise in math. Cancer and heart disease alone cause 1.1+ million deaths every year http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm. If only 10% of the population has vitamin D deficiency, that would mean that you'd expect 110,000 people with vitamin D deficiency to die from these diseases IF vitamin D deficiency has zero contribution. What if vitamin D deficiency increases the rate of death from these diseased by JUST 10%. You are already at 11,000 NEW deaths contributed from vitamin D deficiency, more than skin cancer. And the mortality contribution from vitamin D deficiency is MUCH higher than that.

    Bob K (not verified) | 05/15/12 | 15:12 PM