Is survival from skin melanoma really improving? A retrospective cohort study in Gran Canaria Island (Spain)

Abstract

Improved survival from skin melanoma has been reported in recent years. 1 However, whether this survival improvement can be attributed to the emergence of new therapeutics or to a rise in the incidence of early forms of skin melanoma is controversial and unclear at the population level. 2 The objective of this study was to assess the evolution of skin melanoma survival on a Spanish island with universal healthcare, allowing full geographic coverage, 3 and to evaluate the potential causes for any changes if encountered.We conducted a multicentric retrospective cohort study in the two hospitals centralizing melanoma care in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), reviewing the electronic records of patients diagnosed with skin melanoma between 2007 and 2018. 4 Stage at diagnosis was updated to the 8 th edition of the American Joint Committee on Cancer. 5 To ensure a minimum follow-up time of 5 years, survival data was only calculated for patients diagnosed between 2007 and 2015. Vital status, information about any prescription of new therapies (targeted therapies or checkpoint inhibitors), and cause of death if applicable were checked for those patients. We obtained 5-year overall (OS) and melanoma-specific (MSS) survival rates with the Kaplan-Meier product-limit estimates of the survival function (Stata v16.0). We assessed the evolution of survivalThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.