Skin cancer in African Americans

Skin cancer is the most common type of malignancy in the United States. Incidence within the African American population remains relatively low, but data is limited for this racial group, making accurate determination of incidence and mortality difficult. Factors implicated as causative in the pathogenesis of cutaneous malignancy in African Americans include, but are by no means limited to, sunlight, albinism, burn scars, X‐rays, preexisting pigmented lesions, chronic inflammation, and chronic discoid lupus erythematosus. Anatomic distribution of lesions may be similar to that seen in whites for basal cell carcinoma but not for other skin cancers. For squamous cell carcinoma, melanoma, and cutaneous T‐cell lymphoma, African Americans do not do as well in terms of mortality as do whites. This difference probably is due either to the fact that African Americans have more advanced stages of disease at diagnosis than do whites or, in some cases, because the course of the disease is more aggressive in African Americans for reasons yet unknown.