People like Eloise Colton, who's had skin cancer, may be more prone to develop other forms of cancer.

(CNN) -- People who have had even the most minor forms of skin cancer are at greater risk of dying from more serious cancers years later, according to new research.

Ronald Reagan had a minor skin cancer removed while he was president and helped spread the word on prevention.

"I've told everyone to think of my nose as a billboard warning people to stay out of the sun," he said at the time.

Now researchers say the most common and curable skin cancers may be the billboard for more dangerous cancers to come years later.

The discovery, outlined in a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, comes from a survey of more than a million people taken during President Reagan's first term.

Ronald Reagan warned people about the dangers of sun exposure when he was diagnosed with skin cancer during his presidency.

"The group who had reported skin cancer in 1982 had about a 25 to 30 percent higher death rate from cancers generally during the next 12 years than people who did not report skin cancer," said Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society.

Among those with a history of non-melanoma skin cancer, the chance of eventually dying from lung cancer was 37 percent greater for men and 46 percent greater for women.

The breast cancer risk death risk jumped 34 percent for women, and for men, there was a 26 percent increase in prostate cancer mortality.

Both men and women who had minor skin cancer had a three-fold increase in the chance of dying from melanoma, a fast-spreading form of skin cancer.

"The question here is why is there an association between these more minor cancers and potentially more dangerous cancers?" Thun said.

It could be that people like Eloise Colton, who's had both skin and breast cancer, inherit a greater susceptibility to cancer in general.

"Those who are at risk for other cancers should be screened routinely: colonoscopy, chest x-rays and mammograms and those types of things that are important at their ages," said Colton's doctor, Carl Washington of Emory University.