Recurrent disease in patients with stage III melanoma in the era of adjuvant immune and targeted therapy.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
e21570 Background: Advancements in systemic therapy have reduced recurrence, and the adoption of nodal surveillance in place of dissection has reduced morbidity for patients with Stage III melanoma. The objective of this study was to describe the timing and pattern of recurrence in stage III melanoma patients and evaluate the impact of adjuvant treatment and nodal surveillance. Methods: A multicenter retrospective chart review of patients with pathologically confirmed Stage III cutaneous melanoma seen at either the Juravinski Cancer Centre or Walker Family Cancer Centre in Ontario, Canada from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2019. Results: There were 137 patients with Stage III melanoma: 18% IIIA, 22% IIIB, 52% IIIC, and 8% Stage IIID as per the 8th American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) 2018 staging system. 103 (75%) patients had sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) only as part of initial surgical therapy, 6 (4%) had SLNB with completion dissection, and 25 (18%) had upfront radical nodal dissection. 67 (49%) patients received adjuvant therapy, of which 50 (74%) had immunotherapy, 17 (25%) received BRAF-targeted therapy, and 1 (1%) had interferon. 54 (39%) patients developed recurrent disease, with a median time to recurrence of 8.5 months (IQR: 4.3-14.9). The recurrence rates were 63% in patients who did not have adjuvant treatment and 37% in those who had adjuvant therapy, with a median time-to-recurrence of 7.5 and 9.0 months respectively. There were 30 (56%) loco-regional recurrences and 24 (44%) distant recurrences. Of the patients with loco-regional recurrence, 26 (87%) had SLNB only compared to 4 (13%) who had upfront or completion dissection. 12 (24%) patients recurred while on adjuvant treatment (7 distant recurrences and 5 loco-regional recurrences), and 8 (13%) patients recurred following completion of adjuvant treatment (5 distant recurrences and 3 loco-regional recurrences). Recurrences were detected by patients, clinicians, CT and nodal US surveillance in 43%, 20%, 28% and 9% of cases, respectively. The majority of loco-regional recurrence was detected clinically (67%) rather than by radiologic surveillance (33%). Of the 30 loco-regional recurrences, 24 underwent surgical resection of the recurrence, 4 had subsequent systemic therapy without surgery, 1 had intra-tumoral injections and 1 had no treatment. Conclusions: Recurrences in Stage III melanoma occur early, often within a year, with higher rates of loco-regional rather than distant disease. Recurrence rates were lower in those who received adjuvant therapy, but the majority of recurrences were detected by patients or clinicians, including loco-regional recurrences in patients who had SLNB only despite surveillance nodal US.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".