NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The overall survival of people diagnosed with melanoma, the most serious type of skin cancer, has improved over the past 25 years or so, German researchers report.
They note in their report in the medical journal Cancer that melanoma is quite curable if it's caught early; however, the improvement in survival they have observed may not be entirely due to early diagnosis.
Dr. Claus Garbe and colleagues from Eberhard-Karis-University in Tuebingen analyzed the survival of 4791 patients diagnosed with invasive melanoma in southern Germany between 1976 and 2001, in order to assess factors associated with better survival rates.
The proportion of patients who survived for 10 years, overall, was 88.6% among patients diagnosed in 1990-2001, significantly better than the 80.0% of those diagnosed in 1976-1989.
One factor that affects the deadliness of the tumor is its thickness. The researchers found that the average tumor thickness decreased from 1.07 mm in the period 1976-1989 to 0.75 mm in 1990-2001.
The investigators' analysis showed that tumor thickness, ulceration, age, gender, anatomical site, and period of primary diagnosis independently predicted overall survival.
"Interestingly, we found that the survival of patients diagnosed since 1990 seemed to have improved beyond the effects of early diagnosis," Garbe's team comments.
"This could be explained by changes in unmeasured biologic features of melanoma, or by improvements in the management of this disease," they suggest.
