Sunscreen is recommended by all skin specialists worldwide to guard against the harmful ultra-violet (UV) rays that can cause skin cancer. However recent studies show that choosing relatives carefully could also reduce your chances of skin cancer.

It was discovered that having an identical twin with melanoma increased a person’s own risk of developing the disease much more than having a fraternal twin with the same condition.

The other study suggested that having one sibling or parent suffering with several different types of non-melanoma skin cancer increased risk as well.

Some other researches have also shown that skin diseases including melanoma run in the family, but can be difficult to identify the difference between the influence of genes and environment.

Dr. Sri N. Shekar of the University of Queensland in Brisbane and his colleagues attempted to do this by observing twin pairs in which at least one sibling had been diagnosed with melanoma.

Thousands of cases of melanoma were scanned through in Queensland and New South Wales and found 125 such twin pairs.

Out of the 27 identical twin pairs only four had melanoma while the rest 98 fraternal twin pairs were both diagnosed with deadly skin cancer.

These figures show that having an identical twin with melanoma increased a person’s risk of disease nearly 10 times. Whereas melanoma associated with having a non-identical twin with the disease was almost doubled.

Scientists said can therefore be used to assess an individual’s possible risks of developing skin cancer.