14 DAY TRIAL // A team of scientists from the New York University School of Medicine, led by researchers Stephen M. Amrock, SM, and Michael Weitzman, MD, found in a new study that high school students, especially girls, who use tanning beds are also more likely to engage in risky behaviors related to poor weight loss strategies. The experts found that the group was likely to use dangerous methods of losing weight.
Some of the unhealthy weight control behaviors that the team discovered included inducing vomiting and taking normal or excessive amounts of diet pills. This type of connection, between tanning bed use and risky weight-related activities, has never been documented before. Counter-intuitively, the study also found that boys were just as likely to engage in this type of behavior as girls were.
One of the most interesting implications of the new research is that teen groups who use indoor tanning might be analyzed as potentially being at higher risk of developing eating disorders later on. Furthermore, members of these groups are known to have a higher chance of developing skin cancers called melanoma as a result of their exposure to ultraviolet radiations.
For this study, investigators surveyed data from more than 27,000 high school students in the United States. Of this sample, around 23 percent of all females had used tanning beds over the past year, as had 6.5 percent of males. Details of the research were published in the latest issue of the esteemed Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, PsychCentral reports.
A higher rate of tanning bed use was recorded in teens over the age of 18: around a third of all girls and 11 percent of all boys reported using such devices in the past year. These test subjects were found to be more likely to report negative weight-loss behaviors, such as taking laxatives or vomiting to lose weight, administering pills, liquids, and powders to themselves, or not eating for more than 24 hours.
One of the reasons why teens use tanning beds is a series of concerns they have with their skin or body image. Negative body images are a known factor leading to indoor tanning method use, researchers say, but the exact mechanics underlying this link may be different from boys to girls, they go on to say.
“Greater attention to these issues by pediatricians may help reduce the number of adolescents risking potentially deadly consequences,” the team led by Amrock and Weitzman explains. An interesting result of the study was finding that males were very likely to take their weight-loss habits to the extreme.
For example, those who used indoor tanning devices were 20 percent more likely than their peers who did not to report fasting, 40 percent more likely to report induced vomiting, and 200 percent more likely to take pills or other compounds in order to lose weight. These trends were also found to be valid for girls, but to a slightly lower degree, PsychCentral reports.