Outpatient Follow-up and Secondary Prevention for Melanoma Patients

Abstract

Health care providers and their patients jointly participate in melanoma prevention, surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment. This paper reviews screening and follow-up strategies for patients who have been diagnosed with melanoma, based on current available evidence, and focuses on methods to assess disease recurrence and second primary occurrence. Secondary prevention, including the roles of behavioral modification and chemoprevention are also reviewed. The role of follow-up dermatologist consultation, with focused physical examinations complemented by dermatoscopy, reflectance confocal microscopy, and/or full-body mapping is discussed. Furthermore, we address the inclusion of routine imaging and laboratory assessment as components of follow-up and monitoring of advanced stage melanoma. The role of physicians in addressing the psychosocial stresses associated with a diagnosis of melanoma is reviewed.

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Accuracy of in Vivo Reflectance Confocal Microscopy for the Diagnosis of Primary Basal Cell Carcinoma

“…RCM enables in vivo, non-invasive imaging of the skin layers and cellular structures in a horizontal plane at quasi-histologic resolution [11]. This imaging technique has been widely used in the diagnosis [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20] and therapeutic monitoring [21,22,23,24,25] of skin cancer and inflammatory [26,27,28,29,30] and infectious skin diseases [31,32,33]. Numerous studies have investigated the diagnostic accuracy of in vivo RCM for BCC.…”