A new study shows Michigan’s skin cancer death rate is rising.
The study’s author suggests better education is needed.
About 9,000 people die of melanoma every year in the United States.
Dr. Robert Dellavalle is a public health professor at the University of Colorado-Denver. He examined the rates of diagnosis of melanoma and mortality rates across the U.S. between 2003 and 2013.
Dellavalle says, while the rate of diagnosis in Michigan stayed steady, the skin cancer death rate rose by about 10% between 2003 and 2013.
He says melanoma death rates are declining in other states, most noticeably in the Northeast.
“Our current theory is education for melanoma prevention is being done better in the northeast,” says Dellavalle.
The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association- Dermatology.
