Source: Medscape
How Does It Compare With Caffeine From Coffee, or Nicotine From Cigarettes?
We know you’ve been told all your life to slather on the sunscreen before a day spent outside. We’re not disputing that advice, but a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association has given us some food for thought: There’s a chance that sunscreen could potentially be dangerous.
Here’s how: Sunscreen ingredients can travel through the skin and build up in the bloodstream, the new report suggests. This finding has raised concerns about how sunscreen might affect reproductive and developmental health and whether it can cause cancer, according to an editorial accompanying the new report.
For the new study, scientists from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) studied the effects of sunscreen on 24 healthy people. They tested four different sunscreens—two sprays, one lotion, and one cream—each applied four times a day, to 75% of the body surface, for four days.
Blood samples were then taken from the participants to determine how much of four specific sunscreen ingredients—avobenzone, oxybenzone, ecamsule, and octocrylene—ended up in their bloodstreams. And it turns out, it was a significant amount.
A bit of background: The FDA recommends that any active ingredients in sunscreen with “systemic absorption greater than 0.5 ng/mL” should undergo toxicology studies, including research on developmental, reproductive, and cancer-related health issues. And sure enough, all four of those ingredients were found at levels greater than that FDA benchmark—some at levels six or even eight times higher.
That certainly sounds concerning. But before we freak out about how much sunscreen we’ve been putting on for the last 10 years, let’s consider a few key aspects of this new research. First, the number of participants evaluated—24—is quite low, and the results only showed blood levels of these chemicals over the course of one week.
Second, the report isn’t claiming that these chemicals are actually unsafe, or that sunscreen should be pulled from supermarket shelves. In fact, it doesn’t even recommend throwing your sunscreen out. “These results do not indicate that individuals should refrain from the use of sunscreen,” it says.
What the report does say is that we need to know more. “The systemic absorption of sunscreen ingredients supports the need for further studies to determine the clinical significance of these findings,” the authors wrote. The accompanying editorial points out that further testing could be especially important for babies, “whose skin may absorb substances at differential rates.”
Read the full article here: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/913130
