TUESDAY, Jan. 22 (HealthDay News) -- The ugly ducking sign -- the idea that a mole that looks different from an individual's other moles may be a melanoma -- appears to have a high sensitivity for the detection of malignant melanomas, according to an article published in the Archives of Dermatology in January.
Alon Scope, M.D., of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and colleagues assessed the diagnostic accuracy of the ugly duckling sign by showing 34 dermatology providers images of the backs of 12 patients and close-up images of each patient's moles, and asking the providers to evaluate whether any of a patient's moles appeared different from the others. All patients had at least eight atypical moles on the back, including five patients with a histologically confirmed melanoma.
All five melanomas (100 percent) were perceived as different by at least two-thirds of participants, compared to only three of 140 benign lesions (2.1 percent). This ugly duckling sign for melanoma detection had a sensitivity of 0.9 for the whole group, 1.0 for pigmented lesion specialists, 0.89 for general dermatologists, 0.88 for nurses, and 0.85 for non-clinical medical staff.
"The sensitivity and specificity values for the ugly duckling sign were relatively high, even for non-experts, suggesting that the usefulness of this method in malignant melanoma screening by primary health care providers and for patient self-examination should be further assessed," the authors conclude.
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