Extensive regression and melanoma

There is information on this page about

• What extensive regression means
• The risk of melanoma coming back

Sometimes doctors and nurses forget that the words they use everyday are not familiar to everyone. Don't be afraid to ask questions and get them to explain things to you in simple terms.

Extensive regression means that there is a lot of inflammation around your melanoma. The inflammation suggests it may have once been in the deeper layers of the skin but the deeper part of the tumour has already been destroyed. The deeper tumour could have been attacked by your immune system and the melanoma cells killed off.

This is important because doctors usually use the thickness of a melanoma to work out the risk of the melanoma coming back or spreading. The thicker a melanoma is, the greater the risk that cells could have spread into the lymphatic system or bloodstream and travelled to another part of your body. Although you may have had a melanoma that was quite thin, your doctor is concerned that it was thicker at some point. If the melanoma was thicker, melanoma cells could have spread.

This is why your doctor wants to carry out extra tests such as a sentinel lymph node biopsy to make sure that your cancer hasn't spread. When melanoma cells break away from the original cancer and travel in the lymphatic system, the first place they reach is the group of lymph nodes nearest to the area of the melanoma. Your doctor wants to do a test to make sure that there are no cancer cells in these lymph nodes. You can find detailed information about sentinel lymph node biopsy on the further tests for melanoma page.