4Th Annual: Is Melanoma Simply A Vitamin D Deficiency Cancer?

I may be an electrical engineer, but I have more than just a hunch that melanoma is a Vitamin D deficiency cancer.  Please consider the following.

One of the skin's functions is to photosynthesize Vitamin D3 from natural sunlight.  As the body's provider of Vitamin D, the skin would thus show initial signs of a critical shortage, which would affect all ages of both genders and, if left uncorrected, would be fast-spreading and deadly--just like malignant melanoma.

Somebody even did the experiment.  Way back in 1981, a small group of Stanford researchers added Vitamin D3 to a test tube with human melanoma cells and noticed that it inhibited their growth. (See Colston K, Colston MJ, Feldman D.  "1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 and malignant melanoma: the presence of receptors and inhibition of cell growth in culture."  Endocrinology. 1981 March;108(3):1083-6.)  Since Vitamin D3 inhibits growth of human melanoma cells in a test tube, then why on earth wouldn't it do so right where it is being generated in the skin?

I realize that new views are always painfully slow to find acceptance in medicine, and so just as I've done the last few years, I'll review a melanoma finding in a monthly follow up post and discuss how it is explained by Vitamin D--or the lack thereof.

Thank you very much for carefully considering this novel idea.

James S.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Have you found any more information on vitamin d and malignant melanoma?  I had malignant melanoma removed from my leg two years ago and have just found out that I have a vitamin d defficiency.  I now wonder if it's because I haven't been out in the sun very much or if it's a condition that has existed for years.  I'm from Alaska and live in Denmark now, two places that don't get very much sun so I think it's quite possible. 

Thanks!

Claudia