Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on melanoma diagnosis

Many health-care systems have responded the COVID-19 pandemic by delaying and/or cancelling elective surgical procedures, particularly during the lockdown.1-3 There is a concern that this could have affected the early diagnosis of malignant melanoma (MM) that is critical to improve its prognosis.4,5 The objective of this observational study was to investigate whether a reduction in the incidence of new diagnoses of MM has occurred following the COVID-19 outbreak. All the consecutive histological diagnoses of MM were retrospectively collected in the pathological laboratories of 4 provinces of the Veneto region in northern Italy, namely Verona, Vicenza, Rovigo and Treviso, between 1st March and 31st October 2020 and the same period of 2019. All cases were stratified in three categories according to Breslow thickness: in situ, <1 mm and ≥1 mm. The date of MM excision was considered for all the time-related analyses. The period March-October 2020 was compared with the same period of 2019.