In a nutshell
The authors aimed to assess the long-term risk of death associated with a type of radiation therapy in eye melanoma patients.
Some background
Uveal melanoma is cancer of the eye involving three parts of an eye (iris, ciliary body or choroid)-together known as uvea. Radiation therapy is the standard treatment in uveal melanoma. Proton beam therapy is the most advanced form of radiation therapy often used to treat uveal melanoma. In this therapy, higher treatment doses can be administered to kill the cancer cells without causing harm to surrounding normal cells or organs. However, long-term risk of death from uveal melanoma may continue many years after the treatment. Currently, there is a lack of published data on this topic.
Methods & findings
In this study, the authors analyzed melanoma-related death rates in patients up to 25 years after they received proton beam therapy.
Overall, 3,088 patients with uveal melanoma were included who were treated with proton beam therapy between 1975 and 2005. Cause of death of patients in this time period was confirmed by government databases. Melanoma-specific death rates (eye and other types of melanoma) and overall death rates were evaluated in this study.
A total of 1,409 patients died, of whom, 620 (41.6%) died from eye melanoma. Overall death rates of patients were 49.0% at 15 years, 58.6% at 20 years, and 66.8% at 25 years. Melanoma-related death rates were 24.6% at 15 years after treatment, 25.8% at 20 years after treatment, and 26.4% at 25 years after treatment. For younger patients (≤ 60 years) with smaller tumors (≤ 11 mm) the 20-year death rate was 8.6% compared to 40.1% in older patients (> 60 years) with larger tumors (> 11mm).
The bottom line
This study provided data on long-term death rates following proton beam radiation therapy for uveal melanoma.
Published By :
JAMA ophthalmology
Date :
Apr 23, 2015
