Skin Cancer Blog

The new Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Guidelines have been released. A PDF summary of the key recommendations is helpfully provided, which is well worth a read and important to become familiar with.

There has been some promotion in the medical press about new guidelines on cryotherapy. The key point made about cryotherapy actually applies to all therapies for all skin cancers: choose your therapy carefully, consistent with guidelines, and apply the therapy carefully.

Cryotherapy is a fairly blunt therapy. By that, I mean that you can’t be sure how far the treatment is working, and you have no control over the margins. You don’t know if you got the whole tumour.

My suggestions are:

1. Only use cryotherapy on a basal cell carcinoma when you have a diagnosis from a punch biopsy so that you know the subtype;
2. Only use it on low risk subtypes; and
3. Only use it on low risk sites and with small tumours.

As always, our first priority is to cure the cancer!

The new recommendations are available here.

Professor David Wilkinson

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Read more from Professor David Wilkinson on recent research:

• Accuracy of computer-aided melanoma diagnosis
• Dysplastic naevi genetic makeup
• What to do when a partial biopsy of a suspected melanoma is performed
• Artificial Intelligence in clinical practice
• Prof David Wilkinson on melanoma guidelines: Dermoscopy