Objective: The objective of our work was to characterize the clinical features of patients with malignant melanoma (MM) associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and to describe the histopathological aspect of melanoma.

Background: Several studies have focused on the association between MM and PD [1]. An increased risk of MM has been reported, even before the PD diagnosis [2], but without relationship with the use of Levodopa [3]. However, characteristics of melanoma are missing .

Method: We collected the data of patients cured for MM and parkinsonian syndrome (PS) in three French centers between 2002 and 2015. Both diagnoses were verified and available demographic, clinical and histological data and outcome have been analyzed. Data are expressed as mean, median or percentage, and SPSS software was used for statistical analyzes.

Results: We identified 33 patients with a male predominance (55%). Median age at melanoma and PS diagnosis were respectively 73 and 71 years, with a majority of patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (87%). Most of the patients (74.2%) were treated with Levodopa. Almost all MM (94%) were cutaneous and located on head and neck (1/3), trunk (1/3) and extremities (1/3), with a median Breslow index of 1.1 (stage T2). The MM was diagnosed before the PS for 10 subjects, simultaneous for 2 subjects, and after PS diagnosis for other subjects. Ten (29%) of these patients relapsed with a median time of 1.5 year. No genetic mutation has been identified.

Conclusion: Epidemiological characteristics are those usually found in the parkinsonian syndromes. MM were of severe evolutionary form, with a high frequency of relapses. These results could be linked to the recruitment of parkinsonian patients who are old people. Further studies are needed to confirm these results, by a gender and age-matched case-control study including parkinsonian and non-parkinsonian patients with MM. No link between occurence of malignant melanoma and Levodopa treatment was found, which joins the data from literature.

References: 1- J.-D.Vermeij A.WinogrodzkaJ.TripW.E.J.Weber, Parkinson’s disease, levodopa-use and the risk of melanoma, Parkinsonism and Related Disorders 15 (2009) 551–553 2- Olsen JH1, Friis S, Frederiksen K., Malignant melanoma and other types of cancer preceding Parkinson disease, Epidemiology. 2006 Sep;17(5):582-7 3- Olsen JH, Tangerud K, Wermuth L, Frederiksen K, Friis S, Treatment with levodopa and risk for malignant melanoma, Mov Disord. 2007 Jul 15;22(9):1252-7.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/parkinsons-disease-and-melanoma-a-serie-of-33-patients/