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John Evans

Variations in cutaneous melanoma in young patients identified


Photo by: Dermanonymous via Wikimedia Commons

There are significant differences in tumour characteristics among pediatric and adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients with cutaneous melanoma, according to new findings. Fortunately, trends in incidence rates are decreasing for young patients diagnosed with this form of cancer.


These findings come from a study published online in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (Nov. 15, 2024).


The paper’s authors note that in the current literature, knowledge of melanoma presentations among pediatric and AYA patients is limited due to studies with small sample sizes.


To address this limited knowledge and determine incidence trends of melanoma presentations based on age, sex, race, and ethnicity, researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study using data from the U.S. National Childhood Cancer Registry from 1997 to 2020.


They found incidence rates were 1.74 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.64-1.84) and 62.05 (95% CI 61.6-62.5) per one-million-person years for pediatric and AYA patients, respectively. Females encompassed 62.3% of the cohort. Non-Hispanic White patients represented 87.5% of all diagnoses, with significantly higher incidence rates of melanoma compared to all other racial and ethnic groups in both age groups, respectively (p<0.001; p< 0.001).


Superficial spreading was the most common of the specified histologic subtypes. The most common location in pediatric patients was the lower extremity, compared to the trunk in AYA. There were statistically significant differences in the distributions of primary tumour location by sex, as well as by race and ethnicity, in both pediatric and AYA groups.


The authors note that the use of retrospective data, selection, and miscoding from individual registries represent limitations to the study.

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