29 Percent of US High School Girls Use Tanning Beds: CDC

As much as 29 percent of high school girls use tanning beds, a survey by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

The teen girls just seem to ignore all the warnings given by health experts against use of tanning beds. "The high rates of indoor tanning among this population is very concerning," report coauthor Gery Guy Jr., who works with the division of cancer prevention at the CDC, told HealthDay. He said that "tanned skin is a damaged skin."

Previous reports show that indoor tanning beds damage skin and risk skin cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, over 2 million new cases of skin cancer were reported and 1,000 people died due to the disease last year.

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, with tanning there is a 75 percent increase in the risk of melanoma, a fatal skin cancer.

This study showed that approximately 29.3 percent white high school girls used tanning beds at least once a year, 16.7 percent of them tanned regularly, and others under the age of 35 (24.9 percent), used tanning beds at least once a year.

Dr Sophie Balk, an attending pediatrician at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore in Bronx, N.Y., told USA Today that mothers generally take their teenage daughters to tanning salons. Doctors need to explain to parents and children the dangers of tanning beds.  "Young people often think they're not susceptible to harm from risky behaviors," said Balk, who was not involved in the study.

The report was published online in JAMA Internal Medicine. The researchers used the data from CDC's 2011 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey that involved responses from more than 15,000 high school students.