Top Reasons to Schedule Your Annual Skin Cancer Screening This Summer

There is no convenient time to hear that something on your skin needs attention. But there is a significant difference between hearing it early — when a suspicious lesion is small, contained, and highly treatable — and hearing it later, when the same lesion has had months or years to change, deepen, and potentially spread. That difference is what an annual full-body skin cancer screening provides, and it is the reason Dr. Kristine Zitelli at Queen City Dermatology considers it one of the most important appointments her Cincinnati patients can make.

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States, with more new cases diagnosed each year than all other cancers combined. One in five Americans will develop skin cancer by age 70. And yet, among the most consistently screenable and preventable forms of serious illness, skin cancer is also among the most commonly undertreated through neglect — because it is often painless, often invisible to an untrained eye, and often dismissed as benign until it has become something more significant.

Dr. Zitelli is a board-certified dermatologist, Cincinnati native, and founder of Queen City Dermatology in Montgomery — recognized as a Cincinnati Magazine Top Doctor every year since 2016 and named Cincinnati’s Top Dermatologist in 2020. She has been passionate about community skin cancer education throughout her career, regularly participating in screenings and public outreach. Here’s why summer, specifically, is the right time to schedule yours.

1. Summer UV Exposure Is the Highest of the Year — And the Damage Is Cumulative

The UV radiation that causes the vast majority of skin cancers — both the melanoma type and the more common basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas — accumulates over a lifetime of exposure. The sunburn you got at the pool when you were twelve, the years of outdoor work without consistent SPF, the summers spent boating on the Ohio River or at the lake — each of these contributes to cumulative UV damage that manifests as skin cancer, often decades later.

Summer is when UV exposure peaks, when time outdoors increases dramatically, and when the conditions most directly associated with skin cancer risk are most active. It is also the time of year when new changes on the skin — new growths, changing moles, persistent rough patches — are most likely to be appearing and when the window to catch them early is widest. Scheduling a screening now, before another summer passes, is the most direct preventive action available.

2. Melanoma Is Both Serious and Highly Curable When Caught Early

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer, responsible for the great majority of skin cancer deaths despite representing a minority of skin cancer diagnoses. It can arise in an existing mole or develop as a new pigmented lesion anywhere on the body — including in places that rarely see direct sun exposure, such as the soles of the feet, the scalp under hair, and between the toes.

What makes melanoma’s prognosis so strongly tied to detection timing is the depth of invasion. Melanomas caught at Stage I — when they are thin and confined to the epidermis — have a five-year survival rate exceeding 98%. Stage IV melanoma, which has spread to distant organs, carries a dramatically different prognosis. The distance between those outcomes is measured in millimeters of tumor depth, which is determined almost entirely by how long the lesion was present before it was detected and treated. Annual screenings by a board-certified dermatologist are the most reliable way to catch melanoma at the stage where survival outcomes are overwhelmingly favorable.

3. Most Patients Are Not Doing Adequate Self-Exams

Public health messaging about skin cancer has done a good job of informing people that self-examination is valuable. What it hasn’t fully conveyed is how difficult it is to perform accurately — particularly on the scalp, the back, the backs of the legs, and any area not easily visible in a mirror. Patients who perform thorough, systematic monthly self-exams are still not seeing their entire skin surface, still aren’t trained to distinguish the concerning from the benign, and still miss the lesions that are the most important to find.

Dr. Zitelli performs a full-body examination under optimal lighting with dermatoscopy — a non-invasive tool that allows close visualization of skin lesion architecture at a level of detail that is simply not available to the naked eye. This is what differentiates a professional screening from self-examination: the combination of training, tools, and systematic coverage that ensures nothing is missed on the examination day.

4. Cincinnati’s Outdoor Summer Culture Makes This Especially Relevant Right Now

The Greater Cincinnati and Montgomery area’s summers are genuinely outdoor-oriented. Boating on the Ohio, weekends at local parks and lakes, golf, youth and adult sports leagues, festivals, and outdoor dining are all part of the warm-season culture here. That lifestyle is wonderful — and it also represents a consistently elevated UV exposure that patients in indoor-dominant climates don’t accumulate at the same rate.

For Cincinnati-area patients who have spent meaningful time outdoors across multiple summers, who have a fair complexion, who have a personal or family history of skin cancer or unusual moles, or who have simply never had a full-body screening by a dermatologist, July is exactly the right time to make that appointment. Dr. Zitelli’s background includes specialized research at the University of California San Francisco Psoriasis and Skin Treatment Center and extensive involvement in community skin cancer education — she brings a depth of clinical knowledge to every screening that patients feel from the first visit.

5. Precancerous Lesions Are Treatable Before They Become Cancerous

Full-body skin cancer screenings don’t only find cancer. They find actinic keratoses — rough, scaly patches caused by accumulated UV damage that represent the most common precancerous skin lesion. Left untreated, a percentage of actinic keratoses will progress to squamous cell carcinoma over time. Treated early, they can be eliminated with cryotherapy, topical treatments, or photodynamic therapy in a simple in-office procedure.

Finding and treating actinic keratoses at the precancerous stage eliminates the downstream risk of their progression. For patients in their forties, fifties, and sixties who spent significant time in the sun in earlier decades, these lesions are common — and commonly unknown without a professional examination. Treating them now is significantly simpler and less consequential than addressing the squamous cell carcinoma they might eventually become.

6. You May Qualify for a Mole Mapping Baseline

For patients with numerous moles, atypical mole syndrome, or a family history of melanoma, Queen City Dermatology offers the option to establish a baseline total body photography record — a comprehensive photographic documentation of the skin surface that allows future examinations to be compared directly to the documented baseline. Changes that are difficult to perceive in isolation become clearly visible when compared to a prior reference image.

Establishing this baseline in summer — when moles may be more apparent due to sun exposure — and before any further UV exposure creates cumulative changes is a particularly useful time to begin. For patients who have been told they need more frequent monitoring due to atypical moles or family history, this baseline is the foundation of a surveillance program that significantly increases the probability of catching any future change at an early stage.

Schedule Your Skin Cancer Screening at Queen City Dermatology

Don’t let another summer pass without a professional evaluation of your skin. Dr. Kristine Zitelli and the team at Queen City Dermatology welcome new and established patients throughout Cincinnati, Montgomery, Indian Hill, Mason, Anderson Township, and the greater Greater Cincinnati area. Our practice is located at 8350 E Kemper Road, Suite A, in Montgomery. Call us at (513) 202-3883 to schedule your full-body skin cancer screening — and make this the summer you finally crossed it off the list.