Active Ingredients From Sunscreen Seep Into The Bloodstream

Active Ingredients From Sunscreen Seep Into The Bloodstream

Sunscreen protects skin from the sun's harmful rays, reducing risk for certain types of cancer.

However, could it's use introduce other problems?

That's the key question raised by findings published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association by researchers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which suggest that the bodies of users of these suntan lotions and oils likely absorb several of their active chemical ingredients.

In fact, the analysis revealed that the levels of these chemicals found in users' blood in some cases surpassed the agency's threshold "for potentially waiving some of the additional safety studies" for these products.

"There is evidence that some sunscreen active ingredients may be absorbed," Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement issued by the agency.

Rather, this finding calls for further industry testing to determine the safety and effect of systemic exposure of sunscreen ingredients, especially with chronic use."

Indeed, the FDA analysis focused on six active ingredients in several sunscreen products -- the chemicals avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, homosalate, octisalate and octinoxate -- and was designed to assess their absorption through the skin and into the body

under single dose and maximal use conditions." A similar study published earlier this year focused only on avobenzone, a key ingredient in many of these products, in that it blocks UVA and UVB rays, that has been linked with allergic skin reactions.

The other chemicals also work as filters against ultraviolet A and B light rays from the sun.

For the new study, 48 participants were asked to apply one of four sunscreen products -- a lotion, aerosol spray,

non-aerosol spray and pump spray -- to approximately 75 percent of their body surface area up to four times a day, at two-hour intervals. The researchers collected 34 blood samples over 21 days from each participant.

They found that geometric mean maximum plasma concentrations of all six active ingredients of these sunscreen products were above 0.5 ng/mL, the FDA's threshold for safety testing, on day 1 of the study, following a single application.