Patterns of recurrence in patients with melanoma and histologically negative but RT-PCR-positive sentinel lymph nodes.

Background: We studied the patterns of recurrence of patients with only reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) evidence of regional nodal spread to see whether or not proposed treatment interventions are likely to be effective.

Study Design: One hundred seventy-five patients who underwent selective lymphadenectomy for clinical stage I and II melanomas were included in this analysis. We preserved a portion of each sentinel lymph node (SLN) in liquid nitrogen in the operating room and performed RT-PCR on the specimens to detect the melanoma/melanocyte-specific marker tyrosinase.