Vitamin B3 may Help Prevent Certain Skin Cancers, Study

A new study suggests that vitamin B3 can help towards reducing a person's risk to certain common types of skin cancers.

The research found that people who took nicotinamide pills ( a form of vitamin B3) twice daily, were at a 23 percent reduced risk to developing non melanoma skin cancers.

Senior author Dr. Diona Damian, a professor of dermatology at the University of Sydney said, "It's safe, it's almost obscenely inexpensive, and it's already widely commercially available."

The supplement pills cost less than $10 a month and are easily available in a number of pharmacies and food stores across the world.

The professor however insisted that the pills should only be used by those who frequently get skin cancers and not by everybody else.

Skin cancers are one of the most common types of cancers in the US with close to 5 million people being diagnosed each year.

Since most common skin cancers grow slowly, they can be treated with early detection. These include squamous cell and basal carcinoma.

"These are sort of the run-of-the-mill skin cancers that so many people get," explains Dr. Richard Schilsky, who is the chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Dr. Schilsky goes on to say, "They're rarely lethal but they're very persistent and they keep coming back."