The American Joint Commission on Cancer or AJCC has a staging system for all cancers including melanoma. Using melanoma thickness, the presence or absence of lymph node metastasis and presence or absence of systemic (body) spread, the staging system will place you in a Stage that corresponds to a percentage of patients who survival for a specified time period (typically 5 years). This staging system is updated every few years to insure it has the latest data on melanoma. This is only for patients who have had a melanoma. As far as calculating your risk of getting a melanoma, there is no model where you plug in parameters and then get your chance of getting melanoma.
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A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and published online by the NEJMindicates Exemestane, which is now used to prevent recurrences of breast cancer, can also reduce the risk of it occurring.
“Before the advent of sentinel node biopsy essentially all women with invasive cancer had to have a complete axillary lymph node dissection…."
The study out of MD Anderson reporting ‘double the mastectomy rate’ for patients treated with accelerated partial breast irradiation compared to whole breast irradiation, has created a tremendous amount of angst in the lay and medical press.
