Skin cancer kills, incidence keeps on rising

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Despite the efforts to increase awareness of the risk factors and early diagnosis, incidence of melanoma is still increasing over the past 7 years.

According to MedPage Today, melanoma-associated mortality rate is increased by 1.5% every year during the study period. It exceeds the statistical trajectory angle for incidence. It was estimated that there were 76,380 new cases of invasive melanoma diagnosed in 2016 and additional 68,480 Americans had situ melanoma.

Alex Glazer, MD, of the National Society of Cutaneous Medicine New York City, and co-authors of the study said, "Other studies have proposed that invasive melanoma incidence rates are rising more rapidly than mortality, suggesting that earlier detecting is having an impact."

The authors of the study also added that, "however, despite the 2014 Surgeon General's call to action to Prevent Skin Cancer, the results of the study demonstrate the increasing incidence of invasive melanoma in the United States on a lesser trajectory in the last 7 years than the mortality rate, suggesting the we are not yet seeing the effect of earlier detection on melanoma mortality."

Melanoma Institute Australia also came up with facts and statistical results about melanoma.

Melanoma is Australia's National Cancer and rank as the fourth most common cancer next to prostate cancer, breast cancer and bowel cancer in 2011. It accounted for 10% in all the cancer in men and 9 % to women.

As one of the highest incidence of melanoma in world, statistical results shows more than 13,000 of Australians are expected to be diagnosed with melanoma in 2016. However, even if melanoma represents only 2% of all the cancers, its mortality rate still at 75% of all the cancer deaths.

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer. Its cancerous growths develop when unrepaired DNA damage the skin cells (usually from Ultraviolet radiation from the sun) triggers the mutations that lead the skin cells to multiply rapidly and form a malignant tumors.

Multiple studies in the U.S. and elsewhere documented the increase in incidence and mortality related to invasive mortality. Likewise, Alex Glazer team also performed another analysis to estimate the melanoma burden for 2016 and determine the trends for 2009 to 2016.

Ahmedin Jemal, DVM, PhD, a specialist of the American Cancer Society explains that Glazer's team's findings and conclusions represents an imprecise way to determine the actual rates since it generally relies on estimate melanoma incidence and mortality.

Dr. Jemal also told MedPage that he he is not sure adds to the knowledge about melanoma. "We actually discourage using estimated rates to project cancer incidence and mortality over time. There is no way to control various factors that might affect results."

However, according to the authors, "the overall burden of disease for melanoma is increasing and rising rates are not simply artifact owing to increase detection of indolent disease." They also explains that the actual incident rates may be higher from the estimates in the study since melanoma is not reportable case and tumors that have been taken and biopsied from out-patient may miss hospital tumor registries if process in non-hospital pathology laboratories.