Watching MIS

The risk for developing a second invasive melanoma after a first invasive melanoma has been estimated to be about 3% at 10 years. The risk for developing a melanoma after a melanoma-in-situ (MIS) has not been fully explored, and it has implications for the post-melanoma surveillance of the increasing number of patients with MIS.

Using data on patients registered in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program between 1973 and 2011, these authors compared risk for subsequent melanoma in patients whose first cancer was MIS and those whose first cancer was invasive melanoma. They identified 55,661 patients with MIS and 112,613 with invasive melanoma as the first primary cancer. In this total cohort of 168,274 patients, 10,876 …