Clinical and prognostic significance of BRAF V600E mutation in non-metastatic cutaneous melanoma patients.

Because of the conflicting conclusions on BRAF mutations in the natural course of non-metastatic melanoma their prognostic significance is still controversial. The present study aims to assess the prevalence and prognostic significance of BRAF V600E mutation and apprehend its association with clinicopathologic features in stage I to III Turkish melanoma patients. A total of 93 adult stages I to III cutaneous primary melanoma patients were included in the study. BRAF V600E mutation was detected using the Real Time PCR. Median age was 52 years (range, 18 to 84) and 68.8% of the patients were men. Overall, BRAF V600E mutation was detected in 46.2% (43/93) of the patients. In stages I and II, trunk was the most frequently affected localization (47.1%) (p=0.05) and regression was found more prevalent in BRAF-mutant patients (38.5%) (p=0.05). Furthermore, males were predominant among stage III BRAF-mutant patients (80.8%) (p=0.05), and both superficially spreading histology subtype (45.0%) (p=0.05) and lower mitotic rate (36.4%) (p=0.02) also were more commonly associated with stage III BRAF-mutant patients. A significantly favorable relapse free survival was found in stage III node-positive BRAF-mutant patients (p=0.02), on the other hand BRAF status was not found to be associated with relapse free survival in stage I and stage II patients (p=0.3). Moreover, there was no overall survival association between stages and BRAF status (p=0.1 and p=0.2). In conclusion, there is no prognostic value of BRAF V600E mutation on overall survival in stage I-III melanoma patients, yet its presence might indicate a decreased risk for development of relapse and/or metastasis in stage III melanoma patients.