Home > Cancer and Treatments

Melanoma (Skin) Cancer

Definition

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer. It begins from a skin cell called a melanocyte. Melanocytes are normally located throughout the skin and produce melan pigment. Melan pigment is produced by these cells when exposed to sunlight as part of the tanning process. Regular moles contain groups of melanocytes. Melanoma begins when an individual melanocyte loses its ability to regulate its own growth, like a copy machine with a broken counting mechanism that continues to make copies even when you keep pushing the stop button. With time the melanoma grows. The earlier you find it and the thinner it is, the better the chance of complete cure.

Melanoma is treated in the The Multidisciplinary Melanoma Clinic.

Learn more by:

How common is melanoma?

The number of new cases of melanoma continues to rise faster than any other type of human cancer. Melanoma represents the most common type of cancer in American women ages 25-29 and the most common type of cancer in men ages 25-44 who live in the state of Michigan. To put it into perspective, 1 in 1,500 people born in 1935 will develop melanoma during their lifetime and 1 in 600 people born in 1960 and 1 in 75 people born in the year 2000 are projected to develop melanoma over their lifetime. The incidence rate increased by over 100 percent from the 1970s to the 1990s. Unfortunately, melanoma represents one of the leading cancers in terms of average years of life lost per person. One person dies of melanoma every 72 minutes in the United States. As a result, the multidisciplinary melanoma clinic has evolved at the University of Michigan, not only to manage patients with melanoma but, also to aid in efforts to educate the community to detect melanoma at an early stage.

What are the risk factors for melanoma?

What does melanoma usually look like?

Melanoma can appear suddenly as a new or changing spot or can develop slowly in a mole or on normal skin. The ABCD's may be useful in recognizing spots suspicious for melanoma.

• "A" stands for asymmetry. When you cut a spot or mole in half, it looks different on each side if it's asymmetrical.
• "B" is border. We look for a jagged or scalloped border.
• "C" stands for color. We look for jet black or shades of red, white and blue.
• "D" stands for diameter.

Moles with a iameter greater than 6 mm, about the size of a pencil eraser head, need to be examined. While the ABCD's of melanoma are helpful, early melanoma may lack these signs. Early detection is most important. The earliest sign of melanoma is the change in size, shape, or color of a mole or spot on the skin. The earliest symptom, although most don't have it, is persistent itching for no apparent reason. Therefore, any mole or spot on the skin which is changing in size, shape, or color or is persistently itching, especially in a person at risk for melanoma, will usually need to be seen by a health care professional and possibly tested.

Melanoma may spread from the skin to other areas of the body in several ways, the most common being through the lymph system to the lymph nodes. The lymph nodes filter fluid and cells draining from the skin back to the heart. If a melanoma cell breaks loose, it may be trapped in the lymph nodes and at some point begin to grow as a lump. The common lymph node groups that need to be examined are located in front of the ears, the neck, above the collar bone, under the arms, and in the groin. At the melanoma clinic, the physicians take the time to teach each patient how to perform a self skin and lymph node examination, which is recommended monthly.

What about treatment?

For melanoma that has not spread beyond the skin, an area of normal skin around and under the melanoma will need to be surgically removed to prevent the melanoma from coming back in the same area. The amount of normal skin that needs to be removed depends mainly on how deep the melanoma is invading. This procedure, known as wide local excision, usually takes from 30 minutes to three hours depending on whether the surgery is performed in the surgical treatment rooms or the main operating room. Melanoma may be divided into thin, in-between, and thick depending on how deep it is under the microscope. Less than 1 mm is thin, 1-4 mm is in-between, and greater than 4 mm is thick. The risk of melanoma showing up somewhere else on the body increases the deeper the lesion invades. While these numbers representing tumor thickness are not magical, they guide the physicians to develop the best overall treatment plan for each patient. Special test and procedures may be done to find melanoma in other areas of the body. The risks and benefits of these procedures are taken into account for each patient and are explained during the initial melanoma consultation. If melanoma is found in another area of the body, away from the skin, treatment is usually directed towards that area.

Return to the top of the page

Adjust text size

University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center
1500 East Medical Center Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

This site is part of the U-M Health System. The information presented is not a tool for self diagnosis or a substitute for professional care. © 2008 U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center