According to a story from Medscape, the treatment of melanoma, particularly more advanced, metastatic melanoma, has improved significantly over the last couple of decades. Dr. Philip Friedlander says that in 2005, when he first starting studying the cancer, metastatic disease was effectively a death sentence. Many patients didn’t even survive for one year with melanoma. Now, it is possible for these patients to survive for much longer; many clinicians are using the phrase “functional cure” to describe patients that respond well to treatment.
A good proportion of patients are now seeing several years of survival, with some even breaching the ten year mark. It’s a remarkable achievement to see treatment change so dramatically.
About Melanoma
Melanoma is a form of skin cancer which develops from pigment cells, which are called melanocytes. This cancer also less commonly affects the eyes, intestines, or mouth. The often appear on the legs of women and backs of men and develop from atypical moles in some cases. The cause of this skin cancer can be traced to DNA damage as a result of UV radiation as well as certain genetic characteristics. Signs and symptoms include changes in the color or shape of a mole or the appearance of a lump on the skin. Moles may itch or bleed in later stages. In metastatic disease, symptoms such as fatigue, appetite loss, vomiting, and nausea may appear. This cancer may be treated in a variety of ways, such as surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and targeted therapies. Rates of this disease are increasing and it is most common in areas with predominantly white European populations. To learn more about melanoma, click here.
An Unprecedented Achievement
Treatment clinics for this disease have become more crowded in recent years, which is an indicator of both the increasing frequency of melanoma and also the improved effectiveness of treatment, as many patients are able to be successfully treated for years. With that being said, there are still a significant portion of patients that fail to respond to treatment.
Chemotherapy has become a less common treatment in recent years and doesn’t appear to provide a significant benefit for most patients; targeted treatments and immunotherapy have become more commonplace instead. For some patients, a cure appears to be a real possibility. There are other challenges that still need to be addressed however, such as improving quality of life with long term treatment and developing treatments for those patients that still fail to respond, but the progress that has happened over the last twenty years is impossible to deny.
