精东视频

Cancer epidemiologist Professor Ad猫le Green looks at the big picture of health to prevent disease and save lives.

鈥淚 wanted to be a scientist really only after I started practising medicine and realised that I was not getting the satisfaction of improving people鈥檚 health as much as I wanted to,鈥� Green says.

鈥淭hat's when I moved into epidemiology and I found it the most wonderful, fulfilling career. I now can step back and see more of the big picture鈥攚hat causes disease, how treatment patterns emerge, and how people fare in the natural history of disease, especially cancer.鈥�

Her main focus has been melanoma and other skin cancers.

Green鈥檚 large-scale and long-term studies have been used in official guidelines of how we use sunscreen across the world, saving lives through the prevention of skin cancer. For her contributions to science and society, Green was awarded Companion of the Order of Australia in 2004 and Queensland Australian of the Year in 2013, and was elected a Fellow of the 精东视频 in 2020.

came out of her landmark study, known as the , which began in the early 1990s. Nambour is a small town in Queensland, situated in a region called the Sunshine Coast, which is, yes, known for being rather sunny. Australia (and Queensland in particular) have the unenviable positions of recording the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, particularly due to the high numbers of light-skinned people and Australia鈥檚  relative to Europe and North America.

Green and her team randomly selected study participants through the Nambour electoral roll. More than 1600 people between the ages of 20 and 69 were eligible for the study and willing to be part of the trial. Half of these were randomly assigned to wear sunscreen every single day. The other half were asked to wear sunscreen just as they previously had, at their own discretion (which often meant using it rarely or never).

鈥淲e couldn't use a placebo sunscreen. Some people ask why, and the reason was that it would be totally unethical to give people a cream that was not protecting them and ask them to go outside in the middle of the summer in Queensland,鈥� Green explains.

Four and half years later, dermatologists examined each of the participants for skin cancers. Green analysed the rates of in each of the groups. These are the commonest types of skin cancer and are caused by exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

Green鈥檚 research found that the incidence of squamous-cell carcinomas was reduced by 60 per cent in the Nambour residents who used daily sunscreen, compared to the discretionary use (control) group. Then, in a  published in 2011, they found that daily sunscreen use in these same participants had almost halved the rate of (the potentially deadly type of skin cancer).

At the time there was no proof that sunscreen actually prevented skin cancers in humans鈥攐nly that it stopped sunburn. Finally, researchers were able to demonstrate the crucial link between regular sunscreen use and skin cancer prevention.

鈥淥ne motivation for my research is to reduce the treatment costs through prevention, because when prevention works, then we don't see any of the target disease and so we don't need to find cures,鈥� Green says.

Green鈥檚 work has not been limited to skin cancer. Her research into risk factors for ovarian cancer and some of the earliest studies of cancer in Indigenous Australians will also have lasting impacts on Australians.

Now, Green鈥檚 work focuses on protecting people from skin cancers who have been immunosuppressed, such as organ transplant recipients. When people are immunosuppressed they don鈥檛 have the necessary defences against cancers, but they are especially susceptible to severe skin cancer.

Her research spanning three decades also accentuates the benefits of early diagnosis鈥攁nd as well as being sun-safe, it is a reminder for those of us who are fair-skinned or have personal or family experience of skin cancer to book regular skin checks.

鈥淓ven though we say that melanoma is a serious disease and indeed it is still causing many deaths in Australia and other countries 鈥� if we can diagnose melanoma early, we've shown that there is a 96 per cent survival rate, 20 years after diagnosis,鈥� Green says.

鈥淢elanoma, these days in Australia in 2020, is not the fatal death sentence that it was in the middle of the last century, and a lot of this is because of early detection.鈥�