To perfuse or not to perfuse? A retrospective comparative study to evaluate the effect of adjuvant isolated regional perfusion in patients with stage I extremity melanoma with a thickness of 1.5 mm or greater.

The use of isolated regional perfusion in an adjuvant setting for stage I melanoma of the extremity continues to be controversial. The present retrospective study evaluates the past 20 years' experience by comparing 227 perfused patients from Groningen with 238 matched controls from five hospitals in The Netherlands and Westphalia (a region of West Germany bordering the Netherlands). All patients underwent wide local excision for a primary extremity melanoma of 1.5 mm or greater in thickness. A proportional hazards regression analysis for recurrence of disease and survival identified the significant prognostic factors, of which tumor thickness was the most important. Corrected for these factors, it was not possible to demonstrate a statistically significant effect for perfusion in terms of time to limb recurrence (P = .61), time to regional lymph node metastasis (P = .11), time to distant metastasis (P = .73), disease-free interval (P = .42), and survival (P = .90). No statistically significant differences were seen for adjuvant perfusion in any of the subgroups.