Melanoma: The Deadliest Form of Skin Cancer

Melanoma is distinct from other skin cancers and is usually a proliferation of pigmented cells. Although, melanoma can also originate in different parts of the mucosal tract including the head, neck, the GI tract, on the bottoms of the palms and the feet which usually doesn't occur in other types of skin cancers. 

Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer because this type of cancer is most likely to spread to other organs. However, other types of skin cancers rarely spread from outside of the skin surface. The ability of melanoma to metastasize makes it the most deadly.

In stage one, melanoma has a cure rate of about 95% so, if you catch it earlier, that is great. A thicker melanoma is something that is still in the skin nevertheless, it has not blown out to the lymph nodes or the rest of the body that still has a pretty high chance of cure of catching it early, somewhere in the range of 78 to 80 percent chance of cure.


A stage three melanoma is when the melanoma has escaped from the skin and gone to the lymph nodes. We divide stage three into stage three A, B and C depending on how many lymph nodes are involved and the cure rate. They are drops down as low as 20% if many lymph nodes are involved and as high as 60 to 70% if only one lymph node is involved. Stage four melanoma has left the lymph nodes and gone to the two distant parts of the body. Hence the chance of survival is much less than the overall average median survival. We are talking in the order of months to maybe a year or so. However, those numbers are getting better with our newer therapies and technology. 

Melanoma patients usually are in two phases. The first phase is if people are diagnosed with melanoma and then they have a positive lymph node. Traditionally the lymph is removed by the surgeon and prevents the spread of melanoma to the rest of their body. 

Several clinical studies are geared towards preventing melanoma from being spread to the rest of the body which we call stage four melanoma worse than stage three melanoma. 

However, the amount of numbers and the younger population is much higher than other types of lethal cancers. We still have an overlong approach to destroy melanoma or completely cure the majority of the patients. But before the last five years, we were talking about getting responses and helping maybe five to ten percent of patients. Now we're moving that bar up to anywhere to twenty to fifty percent of patients causing them long-term remissions, which is a huge step forward but leaves us with another fifty percent to improve.