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What Leads To Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer & Can It Be Cured?

Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer Information Center

Nonmelanoma skin cancer begins within the skin cells, which are of malignant ones. Accordingly, a cancerous growth refers to a group of various cancer cells, which may grow into and destroy the surrounding tissues. Also, nonmelanoma skin cancer spreads or metastasizes to various other body parts, but this condition is a rare one.

Skin cells sometimes change and fail to behave or grow normally, which leads to many non-cancerous growths, like moles, dermatofibromas, skin tags, moles and warts.

However, in some cases, skin cells change may result in nonmelanoma skin cancer. In most of the cases, nonmelanoma starts in basal cells or round cells, which are present in the epidermis i.e. top layer of one’s skin.

Doctors refer to this type of cancer as BCC i.e. basal cell carcinoma. Also, nonmelanoma skin cancer may start within squamous skin cells i.e. flat cells found in the outer area of one’s epidermis. These types of cancer are known as squamous cell carcinoma.⁽¹⁾

What Leads To Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer?

Skin cancer i.e. nonmelanoma type of skin cancer develops whenever one among the three different types of skin cells force in abnormal reproduction of your skin. As the skin cells grow and divide without any halt, they metastasize i.e. spread to many other areas in your body via the lymphatic system.

Most of the time, you suffer from skin cancers because of your exposure to UV i.e. ultraviolet light. When you fail to protect your skin, UV rays coming from the sun or tan beds may cause damage to the DNA of your skin. With the alteration of DNA, it fails to control the growth of skin cells properly resulting in cancer.⁽²⁾

Along with those exposed to UV rays, there are a few of the individuals, who remain at a higher risk to suffer from nonmelanoma skin cancer. These are:

Sunburn History: If you have a history related to sunburn or have to spend many hours under sunlight, your chance to suffer from nonmelanoma skin cancer becomes high.

Age And Gender: Most of the time, nonmelanoma skin cancer takes place in adults of 50 years age or more. Also, as the years of your age go on, you experience more damaging ultraviolet radiation. On the other side, if we talk about gender, we should say that men remain at higher risk to develop nonmelanoma skin cancer than women have.

Light Hair, Skin And Eyes: If your skin has fewer numbers of pigments, your skin cells remain relatively less protected against the harmful UV rays.

Location: If you stay in a warm region or area of high elevation, you often expose to high amounts of UV radiation from the sun. This will increase your chance to suffer from nonmelanoma skin cancer.

Toxins Exposure: If you often work around arsenic and other harmful chemicals, while exposing to radiation, your skin cells may suffer damages and in turn, increase your chance to suffer from nonmelanoma type of skin cancer.

Family History: If any of your family members, especially any of your parents or siblings had melanoma, you remain at a high risk to develop both nonmelanoma and melanoma skin cancers.⁽³⁾⁽⁴⁾

Can Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer Be Cured?

Now, the main question that comes in the mind of a patient or his/her family members and friends is whether nonmelanoma skin cancer is curable or not. For this, doctors and other experts have said that the treatment-related to nonmelanoma is successful for 9 patients out of total 10 skin cancer patients. However, the treatment options depend on individual conditions, which include the specific type of cancer, its stage and the overall health of an individual.

In most cases, doctors recommend surgery as the primary treatment for nonmelanoma skin cancer. However, doctors may even recommend non-surgical treatments, like anti-cancer creams, cryotherapy, radiotherapy and electrochemotherapy and similar others.⁽⁵⁾

Conclusion

To conclude, we should say that nonmelanoma skin cancer may take place because of many factors but the positive thing is that it is curable skin cancer.

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What Leads To Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer & Can It Be Cured?