Development of a Survival Score for Patients with Cerebral Metastases from Melanoma

To develop a survival score for patients receiving whole-brain irradiation (WBI) alone for cerebral metastases from melanoma.

Forty-five patients who met the required criteria were included. WBI doses had to be >30 Gy. Six variables were analyzed: age, gender, Karnofsky performance score (KPS), number of cerebral metastases, extracranial metastatic spread and interval from diagnosis of melanoma until WBI. In order to estimate patients' survival scores, variables showing at least a trend (p<0.06) on multivariate analysis were considered. One point was assigned to each variable correlating with better survival rates and zero points to those correlating with worse survival rates.

By multivariate analysis, age (p=0.002) achieved significance and KPS (p=0.056) showed a trend. Patients' survival scores were obtained by adding zero or one point from each variable and resulted in three groups of 0, 1 or 2 points. The median survival times of these groups were one, four and ten months (p<0.0001).

A survival score was developed for patients assigned to WBI alone for cerebral metastases from melanoma. This new instrument may facilitate the decision for the appropriate WBI-program.