Treatment and outcomes of endoscopic surgery and traditional open resection in sinonasal mucosal melanoma.

OBJECTIVE: The optimal surgical approach for sinonasal mucosal melanoma (SNM) remains under debate. We aimed to compare the therapeutic efficacy of traditional open resection and endoscopic surgery for patients with SNM treated at a single center.

METHODS: Thirty-three patients diagnosed with SNM who underwent surgery between January 1995 and June 2014 at a single institution were retrospectively analyzed; 18 patients were treated using an open resection approach and 15 using an endoscopic resection approach for the primary tumor. The associations between open resection and endoscopic resection with treatment-related survival outcomes were assessed using the Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank test.

RESULTS: The most common presenting symptoms were epistaxis and abstraction; the nasal cavity was the most common anatomic location. The open resection and endoscopic resection groups did not have significantly different demographic or tumor characteristics. Overall survival (p = .66) and disease-free survival (p = .73) were modest and did not differ significantly between the open resection and endoscopic resection groups.

CONCLUSIONS: This retrospective study indicates that the endoscopic endonasal approach is an effective treatment for SNM in selected cases and, when performed by a skilled surgeon, can enable successful radical resection with a similar efficacy as traditional open resection.