WEDNESDAY, July 31, 2024 -- Site-specific melanoma incidence trends may be partially related to genetic risk, according to a study published online July 19 in the British Journal of Dermatology.

Catherine M. Olsen, Ph.D., from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia, and colleagues compared the association between constitutional, genetic, and environmental risk factors for invasive melanoma and different body sites for men and women in a population-based prospective cohort study involving 17,774 men and 21,070 women aged 40 to 69 years in 2011.

The researchers found that 455 men and 331 women developed an incident invasive melanoma during a median 10.4 years of follow-up. For men and women, the most common body sites were the trunk (45.1 percent) and the upper (36.8 percent) and lower limbs (27.4 percent), respectively. In men and women, high nevus density and proxy measures of high cumulative sun exposure were similarly associated with melanoma at all sites. High genetic risk was associated with melanoma on all body sites, apart from the head and neck, in men and women. The association between polygenic risk score and melanoma of the trunk differed between men and women (highest versus lowest tertile: hazard ratio, 2.78 [95 percent confidence interval, 1.64 to 4.69] for men; hazard ratio, 1.55 [95 percent confidence interval, 0.63 to 3.80] for women); nonsignificant but large differences were seen for the lower limbs.

"Our findings suggest that there may be sex differences in genetic predisposition to melanoma of the trunk, and perhaps, the lower limbs, although we cannot rule out the play of chance," the authors write.

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