The wealthy or the poor. African American or Caucasian. Melanoma is non-discriminating. Two news stories this past week showed just how this assassin has no loyalties.

FDR and Melanoma

In a new book, "F.D.R.’s Deadly Secret,” by neurologist Dr. Steven Lomazow, and journalist Eric Fettmann, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death is hypothesized to have been from melanoma. The authors point out various symptoms and medical/political cover-ups, most specifically a disappearing mole in photos over the years.

The book has served to create additional speculation even if it still has not unshrouded the mystery to the satisfaction of many historians. But it has also served to do what we try to do here at Melanoma Updates as well: increase awareness of the deadly trajectory of late or undiagnosed melanomas.

Equal Opportunity Disease

Other melanoma news this week that is more substantiated was about the disparity in skin cancer diagnoses and deaths among Hispanics and African Americans

While the actual incidents of skin cancers and melanomas are lower, African Americans are more than twice as likely as Caucasians to have a melanoma that had spread “regionally or to distant parts of their bodies” at the time of diagnosis. Based on a study of 41,000 cases of melanoma diagnosed in Florida between 1990 and 2004, 12% of white non-Hispanic patients had advanced cancer by the time they were given a diagnosis, 18 % of Hispanic patients and 26% of black patients were at this later stage, when the cancer had already spread.

Granted, the study was based in sun-drenched Florida, but the study’s authors feel a contributing factor may be that Hispanics and blacks might put off seeing a doctor about melanoma lesions because they’re under the impression it’s a whites-only disease. As written in NewsOK:

They’re mostly right, but not completely: … According to the National Cancer Institute’s online database, 28.9 of every 100,000 white men are diagnosed with melanoma, and 18.7 of every 100,000 for white women. For Hispanic men and women, the rates are 4.7 and 4.6; for blacks, it’s 1.1 and 1. Overall, the median diagnosis age is 59.

But the survival rate for whites has gone from 68 percent in the early 1970s to 92 percent in recent years, the study says. “Such advances, however, have not occurred in other racial and ethnic groups in the United States.

And, as summed up in The New York Times version of the story:

"The simple message is that even though blacks and Hispanics are at lower risk, they can still get melanoma, but there seems to be a lack of awareness, so they’re diagnosed at a later stage,” said Dr. Robert S. Kirsner, the paper’s senior author and vice chairman of dermatology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

The takeaway? Everyone still has to be vigilant.