Commentary on 'Indoor tanning injuries: an evaluation of FDA adverse event reporting data'.

摘要

Every activity in life - including taking a bath, driving to work, taking medicine, and eating raw spinach — carries intrinsic risk of morbidity and mortality. The measurement of this risk is subject to some difficulty. In the current issue of Photodermatology, Photoimmunology & Photomedicine, Dowdy and colleagues present their analysis of 'Indoor Tanning Injuries: An Evaluation of Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting Data' (1). This information provides a lower bound estimate of tanning-related injuries from a national database. As expected, without a legal requirement for reporting such injuries, few reports exist. Thus, when examining adverse event rates for indoor tanning, the question becomes, what is the correct multiplier to represent the true injury rate?