Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy for Melanoma: A Plea to Let the Data Speak

Excerpt

Twenty-two years ago, Morton and colleagues reintroduced the world to a deceptively simple concept: that the initial regional node to which a melanoma would metastasize (if it was going to do so) could reliably be identified, removed, and examined to provide important prognostic information and help guide treatment decisions for patients with this diagnosis.1 At a time when routine elective lymph node dissection had been largely abandoned as excessively morbid with no impact on survival, the robust and reproducible technique of sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) was rapidly adopted in the initial management of patients presenting with localized invasive melanoma; further, clinical relevance was soon found in guiding the treatment of many more patients with breast cancer. …