Could Your Hair Dresser Save Your Life?

Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the U.S. if all types are combined. Melanoma specifically is among the top 10 cancers in both men and women, totaling more than 87,000 cases this year.

The best way to catch melanoma early is to have any new moles or patches of skin discoloration checked out—but only if you know it’s there in the first place. Half of melanomas go unnoticed by the person who has it, often when abnormality is on the scalp or neck. You can’t have a dermatologist examine the strange new mole on the base of your neck or behind your ear if you don’t even know it exists. And even if you’re looking, you usually can’t see enough of the back of your head and neck to notice anything unusual.

But your hairdresser can — as long as they know what they’re looking for. And it only seems to take 5 minutes of watching a video for hair dressers to become significantly more confident and knowledgeable about finding potentially cancerous skin lesions, according to a new study published in JAMA Dermatology.

“Hairdressers have the ability to monitor a large extent of the general public’s scalp and neck, highlighting their usefulness for the detection of scalp and neck melanomas via population-based screening and dermatologic referral,” wrote Neda R. Black, MD, from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, and her coauthors.

“Findings from this study suggest that a brief educational video can be beneficial for educating hairdressers about melanoma risk and the criteria for melanoma detection while also building on self-efficacy skills in skin lesion detection that might carry over to improved screening of those individuals at risk for melanoma,” they wrote.

This same group of researchers had previously surveyed more than 100 hair dressers from 45 hair salons to find out what they already knew about melanoma, especially regarding what to look for. The acronym ABCDE is a helpful way to remember key features of a suspicious lesion on the skin: Asymmetrical, Borders are irregular, more than one Color, a Diameter greater than 6mm and Elevated (raised bump).

“Results uncovered room for improvement in knowledge regarding signs and symptoms of melanoma,” the authors wrote, but they also learned in other research that most hair dressers want to learn more about detecting melanoma. So the researchers tested how well a 5-minute informational video might improve hair dressers’ knowledge and self-confidence in identifying suspicious skin lesions.

The authors emailed out the study link with the video to 20 Los Angeles County beauty schools and 100 participants watched the video and filled out questionnaires beforehand and afterward.

Comparison of the pre-test and post-test revealed improved knowledge on all the questions about melanoma knowledge, the authors reported. Before viewing the video, 59% of the hair dressers accurately identified suspicious lesions using the ABCDE criteria, compared to 71% of hair dressers after watching the training video.

Only one in five hair dressers (19%) said they felt “very confident” about identifying a possibly cancerous skin abnormality before watching the video, but after seeing the video, the percentage of hair dressers feeling very confident doubled to 41%.

Of course, 100 hair dressers isn’t a very large group to test a training intervention, and all of the participants volunteered for the study. These results, therefore, don’t necessarily mean that showing the video to all beauty school students is going to double detection of melanoma. In fact, it’s always possible that it could lead to false alarms and over-diagnosis, at least until researchers do more work to learn how accurately large numbers of hair dressers actually detect possible melanomas.

Another caution in this study is that 79% of the participants said they had previously gotten some training on skin cancer, pointing to what researchers need to learn from future studies.

“It will be important to know if our educational video functioned to reinforce existing knowledge or to provide new knowledge about melanoma detection, or both,” the authors wrote. They also need to find out whether hair dressers’ knowledge and skills remain strong over longer periods of time, and they need to compare knowledge improvements among hair dressers who watch the video to a different group the doesn’t view it.

But the good news is that this study lays the foundation for what might become an additional set of eyes keeping a lookout for an extremely common cancer.

“Based on our initial testing of an educational video intervention, training hairdressers in melanoma screening and referral seems to be a promising avenue for future research,” the authors concluded.
 
This article first appeared on Forbes