Noncutaneous malignant melanoma: a prognostic model from a retrospective multicenter study

BACKGROUND: We performed multicenter study to define clinical characteristics of noncutaneous melanomas and to establish prognostic factors patients who received curative resection. METHODS: Of the 141 patients who were diagnosed of non-cutaneous melanoma at 4 institutions in Korea between June 1992 and May 2005, 129 (91.5%) satisfied the selection criteria. RESULTS: Of the 129 noncutaneous melanoma patients, 14 patients had ocular melanoma and 115 patients had mucosal melanoma. For mucosal melanoma, anorectum was the most common anatomic site (n = 39, 30.2%) which was followed by nasal cavity (n = 30, 23.3%), genitourinary (n = 21, 16.3%), oral cavity (n = 14, 10.9%), upper gastrointestinal tract (n = 6, 4.7%) and maxillary sinus (n = 5, 3.9%) in the order of frequency. With the median 64.5 (range 4.3-213.0) months follow-up, the median overall survival were 24.4 months (95% CI 13.2-35.5) for all patients, and 34.6 (95% CI 24.5-44.7) months for curatively resected mucosal melanoma patients. Adverse prognostic factors of survival for 87 curatively resected mucosal melanoma patients were complete resection (R1 resection margin), and age > 50 years. For 14 ocular melanoma, Survival outcome was much better than mucosal melanoma with 73.3% of 2 year OS and 51.2 months of median OS (P = .04). CONCLUSION: Prognosis differed according to primary sites of noncutaneous melanoma. Based on our study, noncutaneous melanoma patients should be treated differently to improve survival outcome.