Figure 1.
Rate of BRAF-V600 mutations in patients with tumor thickness of 1 mm or less (grey bars) or more than 1 mm (black bars) according to age (left), histological subtype (middle), and mitotic rate (right).
SSM – superficial spreading melanoma; NM – nodular melanoma; LMM – lentigo maligna melanoma; ALM – acral lentiginous melanoma.
Table 1.
Association of BRAF mutation status with clinicopathological parameters.
Table 2.
Association of BRAF mutational status with clinicopathological parameters stratified according to tumor thickness.
Figure 2.
Univariate survival analysis according to BRAF-V600 mutational status.
No differences in overall survival (A) but a trend for unfavorable distant metastases-free survival (B) was observed in patients with tumor BRAF mutations. Survival after occurrence of distant metastasis was not different according to the tumor BRAF mutational status (C).
Table 3.
Analysis of overall survival.
Table 4.
Overall survival stratified according to tumor thickness.
Figure 3.
Kaplan-Meier analysis of overall survival (OS) of patients stratified according to tumor thickness for BRAF-V600 mutant (BRAF-mut.) vs. wild-type (WT) patients with tumor thickness ≤1 mm (A) or with tumor thickness >1 mm (B).
Figure 4.
Rate of BRAF-V600 tumor mutations according to disease outcome.
A significantly lower rate of BRAF-V600 tumor mutations was observed in 382 patients who did not develop distant metastasis during follow-up (upper black solid bar - w/o distant metastasis) compared to 55 stage I/II patients who had distant recurrences in the further course of disease (black solid bar - with distant metastases) in our study (36.6% versus 52.7%; p = 0.026). A similar difference in mutational rate was reported in prior studies comparing the mutational rate in metastases of late-stage melanoma patients and primary tumors of stage I/II patients.