Researchers from Sydney University, Australia, have found that your risk of developing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) is reduced after high exposure to sunlight. NHL is a type of blood cancer. Dr Anne Kricker, team leader, was looking at whether high exposure to sunlight would increase NHS risk - the researchers were surprised to find that, in fact, the opposite seems to be the case.

You can read about this study in the International Journal of Cancer.

The researchers looked at 704 patients with NHL and 694 randomly selected matched controls. They were aged 20-74.

People's exposure to sunlight over up to sixty years was assessed by means of a questionnaire and phone interviews. Such factors as working and non working days as well as vacation periods were taken into account.

They found that the more hours people were exposed to the sun the lower their risk of NHL was.

Those at the top end of sun exposure were 35% less likely to get NHL than those at the bottom end.

It is possible that the increased production of vitamin D, due to more sun exposure, offered people more protection from NHL. Dr Kricker and team suggested that "increasing evidence that vitamin D may protect against cancer makes ultraviolet-mediated synthesis of vitamin D a plausible mechanism whereby sun exposure might protect against NHL."