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Staging means finding out how far melanoma has spread in the body. Providers group melanoma into stages I (1) through IV (4), with stage I melanoma being the least advanced and stage IV melanoma being the most advanced.
When your Fred Hutch Cancer Center team designs your treatment plan, they will take into account the stage of your cancer along with many other factors. The stage is an important part of choosing which treatments are right for you.
Melanoma Care Tailored to You
You and your family are our top priority. At Fred Hutch Cancer Center, we offer comprehensive and compassionate care — personalized to you. You'll have access to the latest treatment options, clinical trials and supportive care services.
How to Know Your Melanoma Stage
After you are diagnosed with melanoma, you will have imaging scans and other tests, like biopsies, to tell whether the melanoma has spread and where it has spread. In a biopsy, a tissue sample is removed and sent to a lab where a pathologist checks to see if it contains cancer cells.
If you have had staging tests and you already know the stage of your melanoma before you come to Fred Hutch, we will look at the test results before your first appointment. If you have not had these tests, we will talk with you about which tests you need, why you need them, how to get them, and when you can expect results.
Melanoma Survival Rates
In cancer care, “survival rate” usually means the percentage of people expected to survive their cancer for at least five years from the time it was diagnosed. Data experts estimate this rate based on information about large groups of people with the same type of cancer. The rate doesn’t include the risk of dying during that five-year period for some other reason. For melanoma, the relative five-year survival rate overall in the United States is 94%, according to the National Cancer Institute.
But the chance of surviving cancer for five years or more can be quite different from person to person. One important reason is the melanoma stage at the time of diagnosis. Patients also have different treatments from each other and respond to treatments in different ways.
This means it’s impossible to predict the likely lifespan of any one person based on survival rates. If you would like to know more about the outlook for your disease, talk with your Fred Hutch care team. They can tell you more based on your unique situation.
The Breslow thickness or depth is a measurement of how deeply a melanoma has grown into the skin. It’s used to determine the tumor (T) stage of the TNM staging system. In most cases, if the melanoma is smaller than 1/25 of an inch (or 1 millimeter thick), the chance of it spreading is very small. If it becomes thicker, there is a greater chance that it will spread.
If the melanoma is stage I or stage II, surgery is usually used to remove the cancer as well as a small amount of normal skin surrounding it. The procedure is called wide excision. Stage III melanoma is also removed using wide excision and additionally, all nearby lymph nodes are removed (called lymph node dissection). After stage III melanoma surgery, other treatments such as immune checkpoint inhibitors may be given to help reduce the risk of the melanoma coming back. With stage IV melanoma, or if stage III melanoma cannot be treated with surgery, immunotherapy or targeted therapy is often recommended. Because stage IV melanoma can be difficult to treat with current treatment options, patients sometimes choose to take part in a clinical trial.
New immunotherapy and targeted therapies are being studied at Fred Hutch and other research centers. Melanoma patients at Fred Hutch have access to advanced therapies being explored in clinical trials conducted at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine.