Beebe Medical Center to offer free skin cancer screenings

Beebe Medical Center will offer free skin cancer screenings from 5:30 to 8 p.m., Tuesday, May 4, May 11, May 18 and May 25, at the Tunnell Cancer Center on Beebe’s Route 24 campus. Beebe physician assistants and nurse practitioners are volunteering to do the screenings by appointment only.

For years, the annual skin cancer screenings, done during Skin Cancer Awareness Month, have been a part of Beebe’s mission to bring disease-prevention programs to the communities it serves, including people who are uninsured or underinsured.

Exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays appears to be the most important environmental factor in the cause of the cancer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also warns against the use of sun lamps and tanning beds, which can have the same damaging effect as the sun itself.

Skin cancers are divided into two major groups: nonmelanoma and melanoma.

While melanoma only accounts for about 4 percent of skin cancer cases, it causes the most skin cancer deaths.

Nonmelanoma skin cancers - usually basal cell and squamous cell cancers - are the most common cancers of the skin. It is highly unusual for a basal cell cancer to spread to distant parts of the body. However, if it is not treated, it can grow into nearby areas and invade the bone or other tissues beneath the skin. After treatment, basal cell carcinoma can recur in the same place on the skin. Also, new basal cell cancers can start elsewhere on the skin. Often people who have one basal cell cancer will develop a new skin cancer within the next five years.

Squamous cell carcinomas are more likely to invade fatty tissues just beneath the skin and slightly more likely to spread to lymph nodes or distant parts of the body than are basal cell carcinomas.

There are also several other, much less common types of nonmelanoma skin cancers. These account for less than 1 percent of nonmelanoma skin cancers.

Beebe Medical Center advises people to use sunscreens and to remember children are the most vulnerable and should be protected from the sun with waterproof sunscreen that is applied liberally and often, and people should stay in the shade whenever possible. Children under the age of 6 months are too young to be protected by sunscreens and should not be placed in direct sunlight.

Prevention also includes regularly checking skin for suspicious moles that change in shape, or patches that are scaly, oozing, bleeding or lumpy. Skin cancer does not necessarily have to be in an area that has been exposed to the sun.