WEDNESDAY, March 21 (HealthDay News) -- Sentinel lymph nodes outside the conventional nodal basin are relatively rare in patients with primary cutaneous melanoma, but such interval nodes may be as likely to contain metastatic spread as conventional nodes, researchers report in the March issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
Tobias Carling, M.D., Ph.D., of the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., and colleagues studied 374 patients with primary cutaneous melanoma.
The researchers identified unequivocal interval sentinel lymph nodes in eight (2.1 percent) of the patients, three of whom had metastatic spread to the interval sentinel nodes. They also found that four of the eight patients had an interval sentinel lymph node that was not located in the expected lymphatic pathway between the primary tumor and the sentinel lymph node basin.
"These findings suggest that adequate preoperative lymphoscintigraphy and
intraoperative recognition of interval nodes are of paramount importance in the treatment of melanoma," the authors conclude.
Abstract
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