Faculty Bibliography

Twenty-one patients with advanced malignant melanoma were treated with dacarbazine at a dose of 800 mg/m2 as a single infusion and dactinomycin at a dose of 1.2 mg/m2 every 3 weeks. Hematologic toxicity was mild and gastrointestinal toxicity was tolerable. The response rate for evaluable patients was 22%, which included both men and women with visceral disease. Three of the four responses were complete. Durations of response were 4, 6, 9, and 48+ months. We conclude that dacarbazine can be safely and effectively given as a single dose along with dactinomycin. The possibility that this combination may be more effective than single agents in obtaining complete responses in patients with visceral disease must be explored further

The prognostic relevance of the extent of nodal metastases, lesion thickness, level of invasion, site of lesion, satellitosis, age, sex, and year of diagnosis and treatment were assessed in 213 consecutive patients with pathologic Stage II malignant melanoma (157 with clinical Stage I disease and 56 with clinical Stage II disease). Of these factors, only three were significant: 1) clinical status of the lymph nodes (p less than 0.0001); 2) thickness of the primary lesion in the ranges of less than 2.0 mm, 2.0 to 4.9 mm, and 5.0 mm or greater (p = 0.002); and 3) level of invasion (p = 0.0002). The extent of nodal metastases in those patients with clinical Stage I disease was not significant. The difference in survival between patients with clinically negative/histologically positive nodes (clinical Stage I) and clinically positive/histologically positive nodes (clinical Stage II) was apparent throughout the follow-up period. The 5- and 10-year survival rates for the clinical Stage I patients were 44% and 28%, respectively, and for the clinical Stage II patients 21% and 12%, respectively (p less than 0.0001). A 5-year cumulative survival rate of 65% was achieved for clinical Stage I patients having primary lesions of less than 2.0 mm in thickness, while it was 19% for patients having primary lesions of 5.0 mm or more in thickness. For pathologic Stage II malignant melanoma patients, prognosis is most dependent on the clinical status of the lymph nodes, not on the number of lymph nodes with micrometastases

Ionizing radiation as used for therapy for cancer is probably weakly carcinogenic at worst. The probability that cancers will be induced at a distance from the treatment volume is so small that it can only be inferred from experiences with large populations exposed to much higher radiation doses. The risk of cancer in and adjacent to the treatment volume also appears to be small, especially in adults. Intensive radiotherapy or radiotherapy of children 20 to 30 years ago appears to have induced secondary cancers in about 3 to 4 per cent of those treated, but modern practice has every expectation of reducing this incidence. No precise risk factor can be offered, but it seems likely that less than 3 to 4 per cent is a reasonable projection. The reason for the low carcinogenicity in the treatment volume probably lies in the fact that the irradiation dose is high and many cells are killed rather than transformed. The frequency of the induction of radiogenic cancer adjacent to or near the treatment volume is expected to vary according to the tissue exposed. It is not estimated to exceed a few per cent in the worst instances (for example, breast and thyroid gland) and is much less than 1 per cent in most tissues