[Evaluation criteria for chemotherapeutics for malignant skin carcinomas]

Malignant skin carcinomas occur in a large variety of forms, among them malignant melanoma with a poor prognosis, such as squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, appendix tumors of skin (e.g., sweat gland carcinoma, sebaceous gland carcinoma), metastatic carcinomas of skin, intraepidermal carcinomas (e.g., Bowen's disease, Paget's disease) and mesenchymal carcinomas including mycosis fungoides (cutaneous T cell lymphoma). Furthermore, not only do they present with varied clinical symptoms, some forming tumors or erythemas, some being infiltrative in nature and some being flat in shape, but the clinical symptoms also vary with time during treatment. All these conditions conspire to make the evaluation of chemotherapeutics complicated and difficult. In the field of dermatology topical drugs provide a no less powerful weapon than drugs for systemic administration with which to combat skin carcinomas and are simple and easy to administer. In consideration of those clinical and therapeutic aspects of malignant skin carcinomas new evaluation criteria for chemotherapeutics for topical and systemic administration have been established by adding three-way measurement to the conventional methods of one- and two-way measurement for measurable lesions along with the evaluation of the response of clinical symptoms to chemotherapeutics in unmeasurable carcinomas. The new version of criteria is based in its general framework on the Japan Society for Cancer Therapy's Evaluation Criteria for Chemotherapeutics for Solid Carcinomas by Koyama and Saito and the new version has been approved at the 26th general meeting of the Japan Society for Cancer Therapy (1988, Niigata).