Eating fish has long been considered a healthy habit, but a new study may cause people to reconsider that old idea.
Research has found that eating large amounts of fish may be linked to higher risks of skin cancer, according to a news release.
“Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer in the US, and the lifetime risk of developing melanoma is 1 in 38 for whites, 1 in 1,000 for blacks, and 1 in 167 for Hispanics,” said Eunyoung Cho , author of the study.
How has the link between fish consumption and skin cancer been studied?
“Although fish consumption has increased in the US and Europe in recent decades, the results of previous studies investigating associations between consumption and melanoma risk have been inconsistent. Our findings identified an association that warrants further investigation,” she added, as quoted by Interesting Engineering.
Researchers from Brown University and the National Cancer Institute, both in the US, followed the eating habits of 491,367 Americans aged 50 to 71 for more than 15 years to assess how many of them developed melanoma, a aggressive form of skin cancer in response to high fish consumption.
What did the researchers discover?
The findings indicated that participants who ate about two servings of fish per week, on average, had a 22% higher risk of developing melanoma and a 28% higher risk of developing abnormal skin cells that could be a precursor to cancer compared to people who ate less than half a portion.
“We speculate that our findings could be attributed to contaminants in the fish, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, arsenic and mercury. Previous research has found that higher fish consumption is associated with higher levels of these contaminants in the body and has identified associations between these contaminants and a higher risk of skin cancer,” says Cho.
“However, we note that our study did not investigate the concentrations of these contaminants in the participants’ bodies, so further research is needed to confirm this relationship,” she added.
An imperfect study
The researchers caution that their study did not take into account some risk factors for melanoma, such as the number of moles, hair color, history of severe sunburn and sun-related behaviors. In addition, the participants’ daily fish intake was calculated at the start of the research and may have changed over the 15 years that the subjects were followed and evaluated.
All of these elements could lead to inaccurate or misleading results, so the researchers noted that they do not recommend any changes in fish consumption at this time and that the sun remains the dominant cause of skin cancer.
However, the paper is a first step in understanding the link between fish consumption and skin cancer.
