The risk of young women getting melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, increased over the last 25 years and researchers blame it on the growing trend of tanning.

A team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health looked at data from women aged 15 to 39 from a network of cancer registries across the U.S. in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program from 1973 to 2004

Low vitamin D levels is linked with cardiac risks, a new study has found adding to the pre-existing evidence about the "sunshine" vitamin's role in good health.

The study, published in the June 23, 2008 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that patients with the lowest blood levels of vitamin D were about two times more likely to die from any cause during the next eight years than those with the highest levels. The link with cardio-related deaths was particularly strong in those with low vitamin D levels

Doctors have successfully saved the life of an advanced skin cancer patient by treating him with clones of his own immune cells. The 52-year-old man from a small town in Oregon was declared free of melanoma two years after treatment.

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who treated the dying patient extracted white blood cells, the key component of the immune system, and grew the infection-fighting T cells in the laboratory. The cloned T cells, which had been vastly expanded, were then reinfused to the patient to fight the cancer

Inadequate exposure to the sun, the main source of Vitamin D, was linked by a Mount Sinai Hospital study to breast cancer. Data used by researchers included a study on 512 Canadian women with an average age of 50 undergoing breast cancer treatment at three University of Toronto hospitals from 1989 to 1995.

Findings showed that 94 percent of women had higher chances of having breast cancer if they lacked sufficient exposure to sunshine. But getting Vitamin D is linked with geography. In cold countries like Canada, the strong ultraviolet rays from the sun is only available on certain months

new virus called Merkel cell polyomavirus or MCV, which is linked to a rare but lethal type of skin cancer, has been discovered by an American researcher. MCV, according to a study by the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute published Thursday, is the first virus to be associated with a specific type of cancer.

The cancer, Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC), mainly affects people with weak immune systems including AIDS patients and those who recently underwent transplant procedures. Nearly 1,500 cases of Merkel cancer are reported annually. Around 50 percent of the patients with advanced stages of the cancer survive for nine months only