(Tuesday, 1 may HealthDay News), when it comes to survive skin cancer called melanoma, nature seems to have focused on women a better hand than men, new research suggests.
By almost all measures, the analysis of four European studies concluded that women can expect a better outcome by 30% than men after a diagnosis of early stage melanoma. This gap, researchers say, may be rooted in fundamental differences in biology of equality between the sexes.
"The advantage of 30 per cent applies to survive," said author Dr. Arjen Joosse, the Ministry of public health study at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. "It also applies to [broadcast] metastasis: women were 30% less likely to live a metastasis to the lymph nodes and other organs."
Joosse and colleagues at Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and France published their findings in the Online Edition on 30 April of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
In an editorial accompanying the study, Dr. Vernon Sondak, Chairman of the Department of Oncology skin at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, noted that more than 70,000 Americans have been diagnosed with melanoma invasive in 2011, and about 43% of people were women. But, among some 8 800 deaths melanoma this year, only 35% have been patient.
Joosse noted that the fact that women tend to fare better than men after a diagnosis of melanoma as a well established observation based on previous research, which conducted the current study team. However, the reasons for the difference in prognosis remain elusive.
And the new research has found an association between sex and survival of melanoma, not a cause to effect.
To study the issue, Joosse and his team analyzed data on about 2 700 patients with melanoma has been gleaned from four trials conducted in Europe different melanoma.
All men and women of melanoma patients were diagnosed in step 1 (at the beginning) or stage 2 cancer (localized). During and after treatment, all patients were followed by death, relapse, the spread and the remission of the disease.
The result: male patients melanoma showed the worst features of disease diagnosis and worse disease progression.
On the extent of the latter, patients were found to have a "highly compatible and independent advantage" on men in terms of overall survival, before and after menopause.
The only exception was observed in the case of melanoma of head and neck, where gender differences have disappeared. But the team has warned that even this exception might finally be dismissed as misleading, because the key study peculiarities.
It is not that the initial tumour begins with the worst of men that women, the authors noted. It is rather something sex that causes cancer to take place in a lethal manner of men.
In theory, the estrogen level differences may play a role, although the team found that the evidence so far that the hormone does not have much effect on melanoma.
Other possibilities include differences between the sexes on the metabolism of vitamin D, the system immune, male testosterone, and what is known as "oxidative stress" in the body.
"However, our data could not support or rebut one of these assumptions," Joosse recognized.
Sondak said that, while the gap between the sexes is true, it is probably a function of biology and the environment.
"I think the message here is that if you are a man, think like a woman," said Sondak. "And this is because most of us feel that much of this has to do with the fact that women are somewhat more likely to pay attention to their skin and notice something on their skin and especially, do something about it immediately." "And with melanoma, early detection is the key," he noted.
"So I think, in large part, it is a behavioural issue, not a matter of genetics," Sondak added. "However, this is not the issue." It is also the case that what we now call the melanoma, a disease, can be many different diseases caused by many different things. And with that there may be genetic differences, all things being equal, in how men and women get in the first place these different diseases. This study looks at that. But it is another important aspect. »
More information
For more information about melanoma, visit the US National Cancer Institute.
SOURCES: Arjen Joosse, M.D., Department of public health, Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Vernon Sondak, MD, physician and Chairman, Department of skin Oncology, Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa; 30 April 2012, Journal of Clinical Oncology, online
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