Prognostic importance of a second invasive primary melanoma according to tumor stage.

Abstract

It is well known that a considerable proportion of the Caucasian population in many countries are diagnosed with multiple melanomas over time(1) . Despite this, most analyses of melanoma survival, including that of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC), consider only one tumor for every patient and disregard the potential effect of multiple melanomas on outcomes and this is reflected in the lack of specific management guidelines for patients with multiple melanomas beyond those dictated by the clinicopathological features of each tumour(2-4) . Recently we and others have shown that patients with multiple primary invasive melanomas have an increased risk of melanoma death compared to patients with a single melanoma(5,6) . This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.