Text messages up sunscreen usage

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters Health) - People who receive daily text message reminders are more likely to adhere to sunscreen recommendations than those not receiving reminders, researchers reported here at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD).

Sun exposure is the major risk factor for a number of skin cancers. Dermatologists generally agree that there is no safe level of exposure and recommend the use of sunscreens to reduce the risk, particularly in fair-skinned individuals.

Dr. April Armstrong, with Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues developed a text message reminder service and then tested its impact on adherence rates to sunscreen.

In their study, 70 individuals were randomly assigned to receive the text message reminders or not. All participants in the trial were asked to apply sunscreen for 6 weeks.

Adherence to daily sunscreen use was evaluated using a novel electronic monitoring device, which sends a message to a central server in real-time each time that the tube is opened.

At the end of the 6-week study, the no-reminder group had an average adherence of 12.6 days of sunscreen application, which corresponded to a 30.0 percent daily adherence rate. The group that got daily reminder messages had an average adherence of 23.6 days, or a daily rate of 56.1 percent.

In a survey after the study, subjects in the reminder group said that the usefulness of the text messaging system in terms of improving their adherence to sunscreen was 8.31 on a 10-point scale, where "0" meant "not useful at all" and 10 meant "most useful."

"The findings suggest that a simple daily reminder can maintain improved long-term adherence to sunscreen application, thereby encouraging a sun-protective behavior that is likely to be beneficial in decreasing the risk of skin cancer," the authors wrote in their poster presentation.

Using existing cellular text-message technology offers an innovative, low cost, and effective method of improving adherence to sunscreen, they conclude.

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