Surgical treatment of stage IV melanoma

Surgical therapy plays an important role in the management of selected patients with metastatic melanoma. Patients are frequently symptomatic from metastatic lesions, have few effective therapeutic options, and are faced with dismal outcomes. Surgical resection may provide successful palliation of symptomatic lesions with low morbidity and operative mortality. In carefully selected patients, resections performed with curative intent may result in improved survival if a pattern of disease recurrence suggestive of favorable tumor biology is present, and if complete resection of tumor is achieved. Because the majority of post-surgical metastatic patients eventually relapse and succumb to distant disease, adjuvant immunotherapeutic strategies are currently being evaluated.