People who had vitamin D deficiency (less than 10 ng/mL) when they were diagnosed with skin cancer were more than twice as likely to have a lower survival rate than those whose levels were higher. This association was not affected by the depth of the skin cancer or the age and sex of the patients. This is the finding of a Spanish research team that examined vitamin D levels in 264 patients with invasive skin cancer melanoma in a clinic in Barcelona.
Previous research has also shown that normal vitamin D levels have a protective effect on melanoma. “Our results also suggest that vitamin D has a significant impact on people with melanoma. In particular, they show that vitamin D-deficient patients have a lower overall survival rate,” said lead researcher Dr. Inés Gracia-Darder, who presented the results at the Congress of the European Society of Dermato-Venereology (EADV) in Milan. She hopes the results will stimulate further studies to investigate whether supplementing vitamin D deficiency can improve the prognosis for people with melanoma.
Melanoma occurs when the skin’s pigment cells (melanocytes) grow out of control. In 2020, melanoma accounted for about four percent of all new cancer diagnoses and 1.3 percent of all cancer deaths in the EU. In 2020, 7,031 women and 9,457 men died from melanoma in the EU.