As the potential damage caused by exposure to the sun has been researched, many people flocked to tanning beds, hoping to keep up their bronzed appearance without the risk of developing cancer. As the dangers of tanning beds are explored, however, natural skin tones may soon be the outward sign of healthy living.

A new study explores the connections between indoor tanning addiction, substance abuse and mood disorders (Mosher & Danoff-Burg, 2010). Despite the increasing costs and health concerns about tanning, the researchers saw that people were still choosing to go tanning. The study sought to understand the addictive potential of tanning, and determine whether tanning proves to be similar in its addiction process to addictive substances.

The researchers’ recruited 421 undergraduate students enrolled in psychology classes in a northeastern university in the United States. The students were asked to complete a self-report questionnaire that measured several different variables.

The students reported on their history of using indoor tanning, including questions that asked about their frequency of tanning in the last year. The researchers attempted to measure lifetime dependence on indoor tanning, using indoor-tanning-related screens based on the CAGE alcohol screen and DSM-IV diagnostic criteria.

The students were separated into three groups: not addicted to indoor tanning, displaying addictive tendencies to indoor tanning, or addicted to indoor tanning. The participants reported past-month substance use by answering questions about the number of days they had used each of 12 different substances in the last month.

Of the 229 students who had reported having ever tanned indoors, the mean number of tanning visits was 23 in the last year. 30.6 percent met the criteria for a tanning addiction based on CAGE, and 39.3 percent met the criteria for addiction using DSM-IV models. 21.8 percent met the criteria for both diagnosis tools.

Participants who showed an addiction to tanning also reported more frequent tanning use, more symptoms of anxiety, more days of alcohol use during the last month and more days of marijuana use in the last month. Depression symptoms did not vary across the groups.

The study’s results may be limited because the associations between types of addiction were not examined to determine causation or sequence. It is also difficult to determine whether the results found in an undergraduate psychology class are able to be generalized to the public.

The information gathered in this study is important for determining the risks involved with choosing to use indoor tanning. There may be a connection between those who struggle from other types of addiction and the development of a tanning addiction.