�Researchers in the US found that several moisturisers commonly used by consumers increased non-melanoma skin cancers in mice that had
been open to extremist violet radiation.
The study is published in the 14 Aug 2008 advanced on-line issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology and was the work of Dr Allan
Conney and colleagues from the Susan Lehman Cullman Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of New Jersey.
Conney and colleagues said people should not catch alarmed about these results since computer mouse skin is not the same as human skin, although the
findings might explain some types of skin cancer the Crab in humans.
According to New Scientist, Conney told the press that:
"We don't know whether or not there's an effect in people."
He explained that they ascertained the effect by accident. They were investigating the effect of caffeine on the development of skin cancer and
happened to use moisturising cream as the carrier, but then they establish the cream itself had unexpected tumorigenic activity.
The researchers then went on to test four common moisturisers: Dermabase, Dermovan, Eucerin and Vanicream, on hairless albino mice that had
been bred to test sunlight-triggered non-melanoma skin cancer in humans. The mice were exposed to UV radiation syndrome twice a week for 20 weeks, which
put them at a high gear risk of developing non-melanoma skin malignant neoplastic disease (the not lethal character of skin cancer). Some mice were treated with moisturisers and
some were not.
The mice treated with moisturisers developed more, bigger tumors (nonlethal basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas) at a faster rate than the mice
that were non treated with moisturisers. As Conney explained:
"We tested a total of four moisturising creams, and all four-spot of them had tumorigenic activity."
The researchers suspected that the ingredients most potential to have caused the tumors were mineral oil, which has been shown to have this impression in
other animal studies and a known irritant, sodium lauryl sulphate, which is a very plebeian ingredient in cosmetic, personal hygiene, and other
household and pharmaceutical products where it is used to thicken creams and too to create lather, among other things.
Conney and colleagues then made their possess cream that excluded these two ingredients (they make filed a patent for it) and found it did non produce
the increased tumorigenic activity of the creams that did include the two products. However, the findings ar not conclusive in that other creams that
did not have these
