Advances in treatment have led to the largest yearly declines in deaths due to melanoma ever recorded for this skin cancer, results of a study suggest.
Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, its Perlmutter Cancer Center, and Harvard University, the study showed that death rates among white Americans—the group that accounts for almost all cases—climbed 7.5% between 1986 and 2013, but then dropped by nearly 18% over the next three years.
The authors say the size of the declines outstrip comparable decreases in cancers of the prostate, breast, and lung. They also note that the unrivaled drop in melanoma deaths coincided with the introduction of 10 treatments. These treatments either harness the body’s immune system to fight the disease or directly target melanoma cells that have a specific gene mutation.
“Our findings show how quickly patients and physicians accepted these new drugs because they profoundly reduce deaths from melanoma,” co-senior study author David Polsky, said in a statement.
The report, published American Journal of Public Health, is the first to highlight the role of these new drugs in helping Americans survive melanoma, says Polsky, who is also a professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone.
The newer therapies, which came into use in the last decade, are far more effective and less toxic than standard chemotherapy, but are much more expensive, the investigators say. The drugs fall into two broad categories: those that target the BRAF gene, which is mutated in a little less than half of melanoma patients; and immune checkpoint inhibitors, which prevent melanoma tumors from tricking the immune system into ignoring the cancer.
For the study, researchers analyzed new cases and deaths from melanoma collected by NCI and CDC. These numbers spanned from 1986 to 2016 and involved nearly a million Americans. Polsky notes that the steep drop in deaths cannot be readily explained by better detection methods, because death rates did not drop steadily over time, but sharply. In addition, many health care groups have been pushing for early detection exams since the 1980s, so the timing of these declines matches up better with the introduction of the new therapies.
