Men are three times more likely than women to develop a common form of skin cancer but medical science doesn’t know why. Now, a promising new U.S. study in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology offers some clues.
Ohio State University researchers conducted a study using a strain of hairless mice with squamous cell carcinoma of the skin – the second most common skin cancer in humans. They found that male mice had lower levels of an important skin antioxidant than female mice, and higher levels of certain cancer-linked inflammatory cells.
The antioxidant, a protein called catalase, inhibits skin cancer by cleaning up damaging compounds that form during exposure to ultraviolet B light (UVB), a common source of sunburn and cancer-causing skin damage. Previous studies had linked low catalase activity to skin cancer progression. The findings suggest that women may have more natural antioxidant protection in the skin than men.
“To our knowledge, we’ve shown for the first time that UVB exposure causes a migration of systemic myeloid-derived suppressor cells, and it suggests that these cells might be a novel source of UVB-induced immune suppression," said lead author Nicholas Sullivan.
This might mean that these UVB-induced inflammatory cells contribute to the genesis of skin tumors and perhaps other tumors, rather than simply facilitating cancer progression, as generally thought, Sullivan noted.
"This is the first report to our knowledge of a sex discrepancy in this group of inflammatory cells in tumor-bearing mice, and it suggests that our findings might translate to other types of cancer," said co-author Tatiana Oberyszyn.