The most dangerous type of skin cancer ‘melanoma’ has already been recognized as one of the leading causes of death from skin disease and requires to be treated instantly. Impressively, scientists at Yale University recently recognized a set of plasma biomarkers that could agreeably anticipate the danger of metastasis among patients diagnosed with melanoma.
Shedding some light on the statistics, the above stated skin cancer attacked nearly 68,130 people in the United States in the previous year and registered 8,700 deaths from melanoma. If adequate and proper screening is conducted, melanoma can often be recognized early and thus removed with the help of a surgery.
“The rate at which melanoma is increasing is dramatic, and there is a huge number of patients under surveillance,” shared Harriet Kluger, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. “Our current method of surveillance includes periodic imaging, which creates huge societal costs.”
Reportedly, the risk of metastasis varies from less than 10 percent for people with stage 1A melanoma, to as high as 70 percent with stage 3C. People who are diagnosed with melanoma are generally subjected to a combination of imaging tests, blood tests and physical examinations. However, there’s no evident agreement over how regularly these tests be conducted or how reliable they are.
The plasma of 216 individuals was examined by Kluger and colleagues. Out of which, 108 patients were detected with metastatic melanoma and other 108 patients with stage 1 or 2 disease. Seven plasma biomarkers namely CEACAM, ICAM-1, osteopontin, MIA, GDF-15, TIMP-1 and S100B were apparently identified.
“This finding will need to be confirmed prospectively before it is used in the clinic, but it shows that such testing is possible,” continued Kluger.
According to the study, the aforementioned biomarkers were observed to be higher in patients with metastatic melanoma than patients with early-stage disease. Not only this, nearly 76 percent of patients with early-stage disease had no elevations at all, while 83 percent of metastatic patients had elevations of at least one marker. Further, the investigators estimated that the area under the curve, a measure of the test’s reliability factor, was 0.898.
The recently conducted study is according to findings published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.