5/6/2013 – Low-Risk Skin Cancers Often Treated Too Aggressively in Elderly, Study Finds

The patient who made Dr. Eleni Linos wonder about the way we treat small, nonthreatening skin cancers in the elderly was 95 years old. “He was truly suffering,” recalled Dr. Linos, a dermatologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

He had undergone multiple surgeries to remove these basal cell and squamous cell cancers, even though these kinds of skin cancers are usually asymptomatic. “The vast majority are small,” Dr. Linos explained. “They generally grow very slowly. They don’t metastasize. They don’t affect mortality or quality of life.” (The deadlier skin cancer is melanoma.)

Read the full article at The New York Times.