Melanoma news: patients with abdomen metastases who undergo abdomen resection more likely to survive, study confirms

The surgical removal of melanoma that has spread to the abdomen can help prolong survival of patients says a new study.

Surgical treatment for advanced melanoma that has metastasized to the abdomen has found to be effective in prolonging the life of patients according to a study that is to be presented at the Clinical congress of the American College of Surgeons. The study was headed Dr. Gary Deutsch, a surgical oncologist at North Shore-LIJ Health System.

Deutsch and his team looked at the data of 1,600 melanoma patients and found that almost one in four patients who had surgically removed the tumor survived twice as long as those who only received systemic drugs to treat the melanoma.

According to WebMD, melanoma that has metastasized to the body organs was considered terminal and surgery was out of the options. However, the new study proves that "surgical resectioning" of the metastatic melanoma can extend a patient's life.

"We have been trying to gauge the role of surgical resection for metastatic melanoma since the development of [immune-based drugs]," Deutsch said. "Today, metastatic melanoma is [also] discovered earlier in a number of patients, likely because of better imaging techniques, so surgeons may be able to intervene before it becomes futile."

In the research, patients who got resection had a survival rate of more than twice as long as patients who didn't underwent surgical resection.

"We suspected that this would be the case, but we didn't really have updated data to back it up," Deutsch said, via News-Medical. "While we weren't entirely surprised, the difference in survival between surgical and non-surgical patients was much larger than expected." "

Additionally, the research team took to great lengths to examine whether surgical resectioning can improve survival rate for patients. They split patients into two groups, one before and after 2003 where treatment therapies are newer and more effective. They found that systemic therapies did not improve the chances of survival either way.

"The reason we looked at this over 45 years," Dr. Deutsch explained, "was that we really wanted to compare the most recent decade, when these newer drugs became available, to the previous decades when systemic therapy was less effective."

However, Dr. Anton Bilchik, the study's senior investigator from the John Wayne Cancer Institute believes that removing the tumor should be a considered approach.

"Despite new immunotherapies, surgical resection provides the longest survival in patients with abdominal metastatic melanoma," Dr, Bilchik said via EurekAlert. "There is so much excitement about the new systemic immunotherapies, but there needs to continue to be multidisciplinary tumor boards to decide when to intervene surgically."