What blacks need to know about skin cancer

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By Consuelo H. Wilkins, MD | 0 comments

It’s not quite summer but we’ve already had near 100 degree temperatures in St. Louis and across the country.  Of course, that means we are spending more time outside enjoying the extra hours of sunshine. 

Over the past two decades, messages about the importance of protecting the skin from excess sun exposure have substantially increased. Products with sunscreen or sunblock are readily available in most areas and are included in many skin care products. Unfortunately, the messages regarding whether people of color should use sunscreen have been inconsistent.

One of the most important reasons to protect your skin from the sun is to prevent skin cancer. People of color have lower rates of skin cancer, mostly due to melanin- the chemical responsible for skin color. Melanin also protects the skin from sun damage. The more melanin you have, the darker your skin and the more natural protection you have from the sun.

Although it’s great that melanin protects from the harmful effects of the sun, it also blacks the benefit of the sun which is to activate vitamin D. Because many people of color have low vitamin D levels, scientists and health care providers have to weigh the risks and benefits of sun exposure for people of color.

Below are some important facts about skin cancer.

-          Although African Americans are less likely to get skin cancer, they have more complications and higher death rates compared to whites.

-          Skin cancer is often divided into two category: melanoma and non-melanoma.

-          Basal cell cancer and squamous cell cancer (both non-melanoma) are the two most common types of skin cancer. Squamous cell cancer is more common than basal cell cancer in people of color.

-          Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer.

-          Although melanin provides some protection from the harmful effects of the sun, everyone has some risk of skin cancer. 

No one knows your body better than you so examine your skin on a regular basis but don’t be afraid to ask someone to help you look at hard to see places. If you notice something new or an old spot that seems to be changing, make a note of the size and location or take a picture of it. The American Academy of Dermatology and other organizations advise that you look at the ABCDEs of moles or other spots. 

If you have a mole or skin lesion with any of the following, see your health care provider. A- Asymmetry; one half is different from the other. B- Borders are irregular or poorly defined. C- Color is different from one area to another. D- Diameter; size is more than a ¼ inch or 6mm (the size of a pencil eraser). E- Evolving; growing or changing shape or color.

To protect yourself from skin cancer, whenever possible, avoid direct sun exposure during peak sun hours, typically between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. If you will be in the sun for more than 15 minutes, use sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of 15 or higher. Remember to reapply every two hours and after swimming. Wear a hat and clothing to protect your skin from the sun.

It is also important not to burn, to avoid tanning beds, and to be aware of any changes in your skin. Melanoma usually begins as an abnormal mole. For early detection, make sure to examine your skin once a month to look for any new growths or changes in existing lesions. If you identify a skin change or are concerned about your risk, talk to your doctor.

If you are concerned about getting enough vitamin D, taking a daily supplement of at least 400IU daily (800IU daily if you are older than 50 years).

Remember that everyone has some risk of getting skin cancer although blacks are less likely to develop it.

Modeling Agent's 'Absolutely Don't Want Black Girls'

Carole White, Modeling Agent: Milan & Paris 'Absolutely Don't Want Black Girls'

In a lengthier article entitled "Is The Fashion Industry Racist? Yes -- And It Goes Right To Its Core," theDaily Mail's Liz Jones sits down with Premier Model Management founder Carole White to discuss whether there's any progress being made on the catwalk or in front of cameras.

White, Naomi Campbell's former agent, remarked, "At the high end, it is slightly better now. But in the mid-range -- the catalogues, the e-commerce websites -- it is difficult. They want girls who are ethnic, but light-skinned girls. If a girl is very dark, they say no."

Jones adds:

Carole says the problem stems from the influential fashion capitals of Milan and Paris.

'There, they absolutely don't want black girls. A black model has to be a real star before you can take her there. They only take a black girl when the biz is buzzing about her.'

However, European cities can't take all of the blame. In March, Jezebel reported that New York's most recent fashion week (Fall 2011) was the "whitest" since 2008, "featur[ing] 137 designer runway shows and presentations, and 5,269 different fall outfits were presented to the world's retailers and press. Of those 5,269 looks, 4,468 -- an overwhelming 84.8% -- were modeled by white women."

White also pinpoints photographers, saying a lot of them "don't know how to light a black girl."

White hasn't hesitated in the past to talk about industry goings-on, previously telling the Mail, "Now, we talk to our models about nutrition, make sure they have a personal trainer. Even our language has changed. A decade ago, we would have just said: 'Don't eat,'" and, "You'd think these girls would have handsome boyfriends, but they don't. They date short men who are insecure."

Struggling single mom sells Obama letter

Destiny Mathis, a young woman in Indiana, reached out to President Obama for a sign of hope in tough economic times, and was initially thrilled to receive a handwritten reply from the president. Now, however, the same economic hardships that prompted her to write to Obama last November have prompted her to put up the letter for sale on an auction website--marking the ninth such sale of an Obama letter that the online auction service has handled.

Mathis, a single mother of three from Indiana, wrote to the president that even though she graduated at the top of her college class and worked for years as a surgical technologist, she had lost her job in January after complications with her pregnancy. "I am so afraid this dreaded economy is going to have my family homeless," she wrote, according to NBC5, the Chicago network affiliate. Mathis is now weeks away from being evicted from her home.

The president wrote back a handwritten note on White House stationery. "Please know that things will get better for you and your family," he said. You can watch the NBC5 report on the letter's sale above.

The 26-year-old is now selling the note to Gary Zimet, who has sold eight other letters from the president so far for up to $20,000 on his site, Moments in Time. He's asking for $11,000.

A Michigan woman sold a letter from Obama in October for $7,000 to help pay for her cancer treatment and for a downpayment on a house. "Thanks for the very kind and inspiring letter," Obama wrote to Jennifer Cline, after she told him in a letter that she was struggling to make ends meet and had lost her health insurance. "I know times are tough, but knowing there are folks out there like you and your husband gives me confidence that things will keep getting better!"

Black people 'embarrassed' by diabetes

BEHIND A SMILE: Someone you know could be suffering with diabetes

By Elizabeth Pears

BLACK PEOPLE are putting their health at risk by hiding diabetes because they are embarrassed about the condition, a new study has found.

Up to 50 percent of those surveyed said they kept the illness a secret, or had done so at one time, for fear they would be judged by their family, friends or colleagues. For white counterparts, the figure was 33 per cent.

But in their attempts to appear 'normal', they would often miss insulin shots or delayed testing their blood glucose levels, putting themselves at risk of developing long term complications like heart attacks or stroke, loss of eyesight, kidney failure and even limb amputation.

The findings were published yesterday (June 13) by charity Diabetes UK as part of a national awareness week.

Barbara Young, Diabetes UK chief executive, said: “We have to ask why so many black people with diabetes keep it a secret. Learning to live with and managing diabetes is challenging enough without the physical and psychological impact of such a burden.

“It is hugely concerning that the health and well-being of so many people could be at risk as a result of discrimination or prejudice.”

African and Caribbean people are three times more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, but 23 per cent of black patients said they were embarrassed about their condition and 19 per cent feared they would be discriminated against or bullied.

Keeping the secret had a negative effect on their emotional or physical health, 22 per cent admitted. And a further 34 per cent of those surveyed, in January and February this year, wished for more support.

Young added: “There are 2.8 million people diagnosed with diabetes in the UK who need friends, family, employers and the public to understand how common diabetes is becoming and how serious it can be if people aren’t supported to manage their condition.”

Quitting smoking makes you fat, and now scientists know why

(CBS) As often happens in science, it was an accidental discovery. It solves the mystery of why a lot of people who smoke look so skinny and, more importantly, why many people who quit the habit gain weight.

"Interestingly, initially we were not looking into feeding behavior but depression," says Yann Maneur, an associate research scientist at Yale. "We were trying to find new drugs to treat depression. And as I was testing these new drugs I realized the animals were not eating as much."

At the time, Mineur and his team were testing nicotine. Curious about this unexpected effect, they looked further. Maneur says, "We found that nicotine, when it enters the brain, activates specific nicotine receptors that are located on specific neurons known to decrease feeding and increase energy expenditure when activated."

So nicotine, it turns out, triggers a brain pathway that essentially tells you: you've had enough, put that cake down. And it signals your body to start using up some energy. But does that mean people should use it to try to lose weight? "That's the trick question," Mineur says with a chuckle, "because we do not want to advocate smoking, of course."

There may be alternatives that could do the same trick. Maneur claims that there is potential for "drugs to mimic this effect to help people maybe lose weight. Or even better, when people try to quit smoking they could use drugs that are already available and known to trigger this pathway in order to potentially limit their weight gain."

The smoking cessation drug cytisine, which is sold in Eastern Europe, also triggered this brain effect on eating in this study. Developing specific drugs to do the same thing could prove to be tricky, though. The same receptors that react this way to nicotine help control the way the body deals with stress.

This study is reported in the journal Science.

Feds seek to close African-American health gap

USA Today

Clara Robertson has traveled many miles from her home in Montgomery, Ala., to walk dirt roads, knock on doors of trailers and help black women face cancer.


Robertson, 52, finds free transportation for women who can't get to a screening or an oncologist. She hands out pamphlets. She comforts. She explains that cancer won't care that they don't have the time or money for treatment.


"In the South, it's so different," Robertson says. "My mom didn't believe in going to doctors."


As a volunteer for a program organized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and theUniversity of Alabama, Robertson is a diplomat, working to erase nagging health disparities between black Americans and all other Americans.


Death rates for black Americans surpass those of Americans overall for heart disease, cancer, diabetes,HIV and homicide, the CDC reports.


"Educationally, we're doing better. Economically, we're doing better, so why is it that this gap will not go away?" asks Michelle Gourdine, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and author of the newly releasedReclaiming Our Health: A Guide to African American Wellness.


Reasons for the gap, according to Gourdine and other experts:

•Poverty. Many black Americans have no health insurance and a trip to the doctor is a major expense, says Mona Fouad, director of the Minority Health and Disparities Center at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Take Renee Harris of Flomaton, Ala. The 41-year-old wife and mother has diabetes, high blood pressure and a benign breast lump doctors are watching. She has had her gallbladder removed. Harris can't swing her share of the health insurance offered through her security job at a paper mill, especially since her husband was laid off.

"I just can't afford it right now," Harris says.

•Fatalistic outlook. Leandris Liburd, director of the CDC's Office of Minority Health and Health Equity, says she is taken aback when she visits her hometown of Richmond, Va. "It's not uncommon for me to come upon people I grew up with who are in their early 50s who are double amputees" and who see this as the natural course of aging, Liburd says.

New efforts are attacking the gap. As part of last year's health care law, the Department of Health and Human Services put forth a plan in April to better understand and find solutions to health disparities. One element: expand data collected on hospital admissions to include the race, ethnicity and language of patients. "Health disparities … are often driven by the social conditions in which individuals live, work and play," according to the action plan.

In May, the department announced $100 million in community grants for programs that promote healthier lifestyles among groups that experience more chronic illness.

Separately, the CDC is targeting health problems that occur more frequently in African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities through a program called REACH (Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health) that steers grants to local organizations.

In Alabama's Black Belt, an area named for the color of its fertile soil but also associated with a high black population and poverty, the CDC and UAB are working to get more black women screened and treated for breast and cervical cancer. Staffers and volunteers are picked from community members who know everyone.

Judy Compton, a retired second-grade teacher, holds weekly classes for two groups of eight to 10 women at Little Zion Tabernacle Holiness Church in rural Dixons Mills, Ala. She gives advice on transportation and on agencies that can help with low-cost care and screenings.

Compton finds women ages 45 to 65 who are not getting regular health screenings by speaking at churches and social functions.

"Insurance is the biggest problem," she says.

Jennifer Cole is the Lowndes County, Ala., coordinator. She teaches healthy eating and says she finds her students have limited access to low-cost nutritional foods.

In Flint, Mich., the CDC and the Genesee County Health Department have tackled disparities in infant mortality by hosting tours that take new doctors to the poorest parts of Flint so they can see the barriers their patients face.

"We forget, for instance, there are no stores in the neighborhood, and that may be why I'm not following your medical regimen for good vegetables," says Bettina Campbell, founder of a social service organization in Flint who works with the program. "If I'm not on time for your appointment, your staff may see it as me being willfully late, but in actuality, I had to take three buses."

Robertson, the Montgomery volunteer, says some of the women she visited who were diagnosed with cancer came to rely on her for support. One showed Robertson her mastectomy scar. Another produced a bag of hair that had fallen out during treatment.

"One thing I've learned: They don't want sympathy. They just want to get through it," Robertson says.

"Sometimes, it's just listening, getting them transportation, getting the utility bills paid so they can begin to recover."

Not Just for Kids: ADD a Growing Problem for Adults

By Jessica Ryen Doyle

Michael Nuccitelli and Helen Driscoll are successful, confident adults – they own their own businesses and you wouldn’t know by looking at them that they are a part of a growing trend of adults who are being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5.4 million children have attention deficit hypersensitive disorder (ADHD), and while the vast majority of kids will grow out of it, about 4 percent of the U.S. population will continue to suffer with this condition.

However, ADHD is a fairly new disorder, which means adults who are in their 40s and beyond were left to suffer silently as children.

“The interesting thing is that (this condition) didn’t exist 20 years ago,” said Dr. Dale Archer, a psychiatrist who is based in New York and Louisiana. “So there is a lot of controversy surrounding this. And a recent study said that this was vastly overdiagnosed, and the younger the child, the greater the likelihood of diagnosis.”

Nuccitelli, a forensic psychologist who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, said he never felt hyper as a child, but always had difficulty concentrating on the task at hand or paying attention; often people would ask him why he seemed to be “in another world.”

“Being ADHD and not being diagnosed or receiving treatment made school much harder than it had to be,” said Nuccitelli, 46. “I hated to study, to read, to write, or anything else academic that required focus, sustained attention, and the ability to complete mundane tasks.”

Adults who suffer from ADD (doctors say they lose the hyperactivity part of the condition after childhood) can have all or some of these symptoms:

*Anxiety
*Forgetfulness
*Low self-esteem
*Impulsiveness
*Poor organization skills
*Procrastination
*Low frustration tolerance
*Chronic boredom
*Difficulty concentrating while reading
*Mood swings
*Relationship problems

Nuccitellli said he was diagnosed in November 2010, after talking to his family doctor and visiting a psychiatrist. For Nuccitelli, medication (Vyvanase) was one of the answers to his problems.

Other coping mechanisms include list-making and cognitive behavior techniques.

He said without medicine, he has difficulty paying attention to details and keeping on task, he makes careless mistakes, he is unable to listen when someone is speaking to him, he has difficulty following directions and avoids tasks that involve effort.

For Driscoll, a wedding planner who works in Pasadena, Calif., diet and exercise – along with a mix of alternative medicine (including self-hypnosis) – is how she treats her ADD.

“What I didn’t like about meds is that I stopped exercising as much,” said Driscoll, who is in her 50s and enjoys kickboxing, Kung Fu and Tai Chi. “Meds ramp up your adrenal response and adults really have to take adrenal fatigue seriously.”

Archer, who has been practicing psychiatry for 25 years, said he tends to agree more with Driscoll’s logic. He feels the American society is overmedicated, and he prefers not to treat ADD with a pill.

“A recent study says that one in four people have a mental illness. We have started shrinking the ‘normal’ box,” Archer said. “Anything outside of that, we treat with a pill. There’s a spike in diagnoses with kids, and then the adults say, ‘You know what, I have those symptoms as well…a little inattention, a little anxiety.’ In reality, those are the very traits of who we are.”

On the other hand, Archer said ADD in adults can be a very real thing, if diagnosed correctly.

“Clearly there are individuals who have it,” he said. “And this absolutely impacts their jobs and their families, they have more problems at work, often because they are trying to do things they are not cut out to do. So I say, let’s look at the things you are good at, they are good in crisis situations, and they rise to the top, they get activated. They get bored with routine.”

Driscoll, who was diagnosed in her 30s, said if she starts too many projects at once and feels confused, she knows it’s time to “get a grip.”

When she is doing paperwork, she listens to binaural brain entertainment sounds in gamma frequency, so she is not distracted by her own mind, which she described as “noisy.” But, Driscoll did admit that a “noisy” mind can sometimes be a good thing.

“ADD is not just about being distracted easily, it's also a way of perceiving the world,” she said. “So we tend to be creative, big thinkers. And don't sweat the small stuff, even when we should. “

Doctors are unsure what causes ADHD, but studies have suggested that genetics could play a role. Scientists are also researching the effects of environmental factors and nutrition and how they might contribute to ADHD.