The following is a summary of “Prognostic impact of Breslow thickness in acral melanoma: A retrospective analysis,” published in the December 2022 issue of Dermatology by Wei, et al.
There wasn’t much data to support the predictive significance of tumor thickness in patients with acral melanoma (AM). For a study, researchers sought to ascertain how Breslow thickness in AM affected prognosis.
Patients diagnosed with localized AM between January 1, 2000, and December 31, 2017, were recruited in the multicenter trial. The Kaplan-Meier approach was used to determine the melanoma-specific survival (MSS) in various tumor thickness strata (T1-T4: ≤1, >1-2, >2-4, >4 mm, respectively). The log-rank test and multivariable Cox regression were used for comparisons.
The analysis included 853 participants with clinical N0 (cN0) AM. The average number of follow-up months was 60.1. Patients with T1-T4 illness did not achieve the median MSS after 111.0, 92.8, and 67.1 months, respectively. While there was no significant difference between T3 and T4 AM (hazard ratio = 0.82, 95% CI, 0.62-1.09), there was a significant difference in MSS among cN0 patients with T1-T3 AM (log-rank P = .004, .012, <0.001 for T1 vs T2, T2 vs T3, and T1 vs T3, respectively). Six-subgroup analyses verified that tumors with a thickness of > 2 mm in all categories had similar survival results. Retrospective design and a few missing variables were the constraints.
In AM patients with a Breslow thickness >2 mm, there was no correlation between tumor thickness and survival.