NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Emphasizing the adverse effects tanning has on one's appearance may be just the trick for reducing the amount of time young women spend in tanning salons, new research findings suggest.

Exposure to UV rays increases the risk of skin cancer. What's more, some studies have suggested that overexposure to artificial UV rays increases an individual's risk of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, although not all studies have shown the same link.

While skin cancer education groups have spent a lot of time and energy educating the public about the health risks associated with tanning, both indoors and out, their efforts appear to have had little impact as the rates of skin cancer continue to rise. And, to their dismay, the popularity of tanning salons does not appear to be waning.

Taking a different tack, lead investigator Dr. Joel J. Hillhouse of East Tennessee State University in Johnson City decided to see if women who frequented tanning salons would stop or reduce their tanning habits after participating in an education campaign. The campaign focused on the harm that tanning can cause to their appearance, such as rapid aging, rather than the risks of skin cancer.

Writing in the August issue of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, Hillhouse and co-author Rob Turrisi of Boise State University in Idaho report on their study of 147 female college students.

All of the women in the study reported that they frequented tanning salons on a monthly basis and averaged about 37 visits to a tanning salon each year--an amount of time that "plainly increases" their risk of developing skin cancer later in life, the authors point out.

In the study, half of the women received an 11-page booklet that emphasized the appearance-damaging effects of indoor tanning while the other women got nothing.

Two months later, all of the women were interviewed again about their tanning salon habits. The women who had received the informative booklet had reduced their visits to tanning salons by half compared with the women who did not get the booklet, according to Hillhouse and Turrisi.

"This appearance-based intervention was able to produce clinically significant changes in indoor tanning use tendencies that could have a beneficial effect on the future development of skin cancer," the researchers conclude.

SOURCE: Journal of Behavioral Medicine 2002;25:395-409.