Trends in surgical treatment of stage IV melanoma: A SEER database study

Immunotherapy for advanced melanoma has improved survival outcomes and changed the surgical management of this disease. Prior work demonstrated no difference in rates of resection for stage IV melanoma after the introduction of immunotherapy. However, prior data were limited by shorter study durations and by only examining distant resections. As such, we sought to expand this work by examining longitudinal trends in both primary and distant resections for patients with advanced melanoma in the years after immunotherapy approvals.

This retrospective cohort study used the National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database to capture adult patients diagnosed with stage IV cutaneous melanoma between 2004 and 2020. We identified the annual percentage of patients who underwent surgical resections.

Of the 10,632 case records included, significantly fewer patients underwent surgical resection in the post-immunotherapy era (2011-2020) as compared to the pre-immunotherapy era (2004-2013) (50.4 % vs. 59.6 %, p < 0.0001). In our interrupted time series, we found a significant decline in the rate of all surgical resections in the post-immunotherapy era, decreasing by 0.97 % per year (p < 0.0001). There were significant decreases in the rates of both primary and distant resections in the post-immunotherapy era. For primary resections alone, we observed a significant level of change with annual rates of surgery declining by 5.1 % (p = 0.014) after 2011.

This study confirms that a significant - albeit declining - proportion of patients with stage IV melanoma undergo both primary and distant resections in the post-immunotherapy era.

Since the initial approval of immunotherapy to treat advanced melanoma in 2011, the role of surgical care for melanoma has evolved. This study examined trends in the utilization of surgery for patients with stage IV melanoma before and after 2011. We identified patients diagnosed with stage IV melanoma between 2004 and 2020 (N = 10,632) from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. Using an interrupted time series analysis, we compared the proportion of patients who underwent either primary or distant surgical resections in the pre- and post-immunotherapy eras (59.6 % vs. 50.4 %, respectively; p < 0.0001). There was a significant decline in the rate of all surgical resections in the post-immunotherapy era, decreasing by 0.97 % per year (p < 0.0001). These results highlight diminishing but still robust surgical treatment of stage IV melanoma since the introduction of immunotherapy.