Early recurrence in sentinel lymph node positive stage III melanoma patients

Patients with sentinel lymph node (SLN) positive melanoma have a significant recurrence risk. We sought to examine variables associated with development of early recurrence. A prospective institutional review board-approved database of cutaneous melanoma patients treated from 2003 to 2010 was used to identify SLN positive stage III patients with 1 year of follow-up. The Kaplan-Meier method, and logistic regression were used to evaluate variables associated with early recurrence. Seventy-four patients were identified. Twenty-four (32%) had an early recurrence. Five variables were highly significantly associated with early recurrence: location of head/neck, Breslow depth greater than two, ulceration, number of lymph nodes positive ≥ 2, and largest lymph node metastasis > 1 mm. Using these five variables, a numerical risk score was created from 0 to 5 to determine if an early recurrence occurred as the number of risk factors increased. The proportion of patients with early recurrence increased in linear fashion with increasing risk score (P < 0.0001). These data suggest that SLN positive stage III melanoma patients have a significant risk of early recurrence, which is associated with several defined variables and increases with the number of risk factors present. These data may be useful in stratifying patients to level of recurrence risk and adjusting follow-up schedules.