Signs of Skin Cancer

Series Summary

Skin cancer is the fasted growing type of cancer in the United States, and more than a million people will be diagnosed with skin cancer in the U.S. in this year alone. Luckily, because skin cancer tumors are usually quite visible, most can be detected in the early stages. There are several risk factors for developing this type of cancer, including sunburn or excessive sun damage, UV exposure from tanning salons, or a genetic predisposition. There are several types of skin cancer that have different symptoms which can be important to look for when you are checking for skin cancer signs and symptoms.

In this free health care video series, our expert, Dr. Susan Jewell will show you how to identify skin cancer symptoms with self exams. While explaining each type of skin cancer, you will learn how to identify the signs of Basal Cell Carcinoma, Squamous Cell Carcinoma and Melanomas. You will also learn how you can help prevent skin cancer by avoiding sun exposure and UV radiation, using sunscreen, and reapplying your sun block every few hours. These free videos are an important source of information and can be valuable in skin cancer early detection.

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Dr. Susan Jewell and on behalf of Expert Village today, I?m going to talk to you about signs of skin cancer. Now, before I start I want to introduce myself. I am a clinical research physician in the area of oncology, which is cancer and also a scientist in stem cell research. I've trained at the National Cancer Institute and also at the UCLA school of Medicine. Now, in this series of clips, I am going to talk to you about how you can recognize skin cancer, ways to prevent it and reduce your risk of getting skin cancer. And also, I am going to talk to you about if you have been diagnosed with skin cancer, the different types of diagnosis and also treatment options. So, here in this clip, we're going to look at, first of all what is the skin made of and its anatomy. Now, if you look at this diagram here, we can see here, the diagrammatic picture of a skin. And you can see the different layers of the skin. This is the surface of the skin or the Epidermis, the most upper part of the skin. Here, you can see the hair follicles and the hair on, the protruding out of the surface of the skin and that should get low, deeper into the skin layer. You're going to go into the dermis layer. And this layer is the cutaneous fat layer. So, here is the little square here that means that this part is enlarged. So, let?s look at the enlargement of that section of the epidermis where skin cancer is found and occur. Now, there are three different types of skin cancer that are most commonly found. Squamous cells, Basal Cells and Melanomas. We'll talk about that, these particular cancers in detail. But these particular cancers are found in different layers, most commonly. And the squamous cells are found in the epidermis, basal cell cancers are found deeper down in the dermis and the melanomas are found even deeper down."