They will also look for any additional long-term complications of the more radical surgery, such as nerve injury. Faries said, to monitor disease progression and deaths due to melanoma. The MSLT-II investigators are continuing to follow study participants, Dr. Among all patients with lymphedema, the condition was mild in 64% of patients, moderate in 33%, and severe in 3%. At their most recent follow-up visit, 24.1% of patients in the completion group and 6.3% in the observation group had had lymphedema, a condition that occurs when excess lymph fluid builds up in tissues and causes swelling. No meaningful difference in the spread, or metastasis, of melanoma to other parts of the body was seen between the two groups.Ĭomplications of surgery were more common in the completion-surgery group than in the observation group. The difference in disease-free survival, the study authors wrote, appears to be due to a reduction in recurrence of cancer in the lymph nodes after completion lymph-node surgery. At 3 years, 68% of those in the completion-surgery group and 63% in the observation group had not experienced a recurrence. The median follow-up time was 43 months, and some patients were followed for up to 10 years.Īt 3 years, melanoma-specific survival was 86% in both groups-that is, 86% of the patients in each group had not died of melanoma. The other half were monitored with regular ultrasound exams to check for signs of cancer in these regional lymph nodes (observation group).Īll participants had regular doctor visits with physical exams, laboratory tests, and imaging tests other than ultrasounds (such as PET scans or CT scans) that were standard for the center where they were treated, Dr. Half of the 1,934 study participants were randomly assigned to have immediate surgery to remove the remaining lymph nodes in the area near the sentinel nodes (completion-surgery group). (Tumor thickness is one factor that affects a patient’s prognosis.) Most patients in the study had one or two cancer-containing sentinel nodes. Participants in MSLT-II were 18–75 years old and had a skin melanoma of intermediate thickness (1.2 to 3.5 millimeters) that had spread to the sentinel lymph nodes but not to other parts of the body. “It seems logical to take those nodes out, even if we can’t detect melanoma there yet,” to keep the cancer from spreading, explained MSLT-II lead investigator Mark Faries, M.D., a surgical oncologist at the Angeles Clinic and Research Institute, an affiliate of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles.īut, until now, the survival benefit of this “completion” lymph node surgery had been unclear. If the biopsy reveals melanoma cells in the sentinel nodes, doctors usually recommend immediate removal of the remaining regional lymph nodes. Most patients with newly diagnosed melanoma undergo a sentinel lymph node biopsy, in which the sentinel lymph nodes are removed and examined to find out if the cancer has spread from the skin. “This is a very clear-cut, definitive result…that signals a turn in direction” for the care of people with melanoma, agreed Howard Streicher, M.D., of NCI’s Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program, who was not involved in the trial. “These results should be construed as practice changing,” Daniel Coit, M.D., of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, wrote in an accompanying editorial. The results of the second Multicenter Selective Lymphadenectomy Trial (MSLT-II), which was funded in part by NCI, were published June 8 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Patients who underwent the more aggressive surgery, the trial showed, also had far more post-surgical complications. In the trial, there was no difference in melanoma-specific survival between patients who had only the lymph nodes to which the cancer was most likely to spread, known as sentinel lymph nodes, removed and patients who had more extensive surgery to remove additional nearby lymph nodes. A conservative approach to lymph node removal surgery may be best for people with melanoma that has spread from the skin to one or a small number of nearby lymph nodes, new results from a large international clinical trial suggest.
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