The survival rate for patients diagnosed with melanoma is increasing according to a new study.
The German study reports that the survival of people with melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, has gone up over the past 25 years or so.
The researcher’s report, which is published in the medical journal Cancer, states that melanoma is quite curable if it’s caught early. The improvement in survival that they have observed, however, may not be entirely due to being diagnosed early.
Dr. Claus Garbe and his colleagues from Eberhard-Karis-University in Teubingen, Germany studied the survival of 4,791 patients that were found to have invasive melanoma in southern Germany during a period between 1976 and 2001. The analysis helped to assess factors that are associated with better melanoma survival rates.
The research showed that 80% of patients diagnosed with melanoma between the years of 1976 and 1989 had a ten year survival rate, while 88.6% of patients diagnosed between the years 1990 to 2001 survived.
A factor that affects tumor deadliness is its thickness. The German research team found that the average tumor thickness actually decreased from 1.07 millilmeters in the period from 1976 to 1989 to 0.75 millimeters from the 1990 to 2001 period.
"Interestingly, we found that the survival of patients diagnosed since 1990 seemed to have improved beyond the effects of early diagnosis," Garbe’s team said.
"This could be explained by changes in unmeasured biologic features of melanoma, or by improvements in the management of this disease," the team suggests.
The analysis showed that tumor thickness, age, ulceration, gender, anatomical site, and period of primary diagnosis independently predicted a patient’s overall survival.
The report is good news in the battle against cancer considering it shows a decrease in the most deadly form of skin cancer.
Melanoma is a malignant tumor of melanocytes. It is mainly a skin tumor, but it can also be seen in the melanocytes of the eye. Melanoma of the skin has 160,000 new cases worldwide per year. It is most frequent in white men living in sunny climates.
The World health Organization reports that about 48,000 deaths occur worldwide due to malignant melanoma annually.
The diagnosis of melanoma requires an experience doctor because early stages of the disease look identical to harmless moles. The treatment of melanoma includes surgical removal of the tumor, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, adjuvant treatment, and radiation therapy.
