Using Mole Mapping to Track Your Skin's Health Changes

Описание: Mole mapping provides an image record to track changes on your skin, particularly if you have a large number of unusual moles or if you have a history of skin cancer. The process only needs to be performed once but will help you and your healthcare provider to track your skin's changes for years to come, making it possible diagnose melanoma and skin cancer earlier. Mole Mapping has been proven to catch skin cancer early, reducing the risk of unnecessary surgery and creating drastically more favorable outcomes.

Getting to know the moles and marks on your body and making a habit of regular self exams can help you to identify when something needs attention. Is there a spot that concerns you? Call us at 801-581-2955 to make an appointment for a skin check and mole mapping with one of our board-certified dermatologists.


Video Transcript below

Dr. Millican: Early diagnosis is the most important aspect of care for skin cancers. If we could catch every skin cancer at the first clinical presentation, then our outcomes would be fantastic and the treatment would be simple, and often wouldn't even need surgery.
Dr. Curtis: Mole mapping is very popular in Europe and has become more popular as we realize through published research that it does catch melanoma and skin cancers earlier. We take photos of the front, the back, and both sides of you, and we can take an inventory of all of your moles, and we will always have that as a part of your permanent medical record, and detect change even later on down the road.
Dr. Duffy: There's a lot of interesting things happening at the University and around the world in dermatology. There's been sort of an explosion of noninvasive techniques to examine the skin. So some examples of these are using what we call confocal microscopy.
Dr. Curtis: And that is cutting-edge technology where it's in vivo imaging of your skin. And what that means is that we're able to put this microscope on your skin and image it and diagnose the lesion and tell you whether it's skin cancer or not. Avoid the biopsy if it's not skin cancer. Avoid the scar. And if it is a skin cancer, we can actually send you straight to a surgeon.
Dr. Duffy: The skin is really so easy to examine, and so if you notice something on your skin that is changing or is not going away, a 10-minute dermatology appointment could save your life, or your nose, or your eyelid.
And it if it turns out not to be a skin cancer, that's fine too. Now you have sort of the peace of mind of knowing that you don't have something abnormal on your skin.
Dr. Curtis: Moles are unique on your body and one of the important things is getting to know those special spots on your body, because the more that you know them, the way that they look, the colors that they are, the size that they are, the better.