Purpose: To report the prevalence of uveal melanoma in a Hospital database in Brazil over the period of 16 years (2000 to 2016).
Design: Descriptive epidemiological study evaluating the Brazilian Hospital Based Cancer Registries.
Participants/methods: Uveal melanomas were identified based on ICD-O-3 codes C69.3 [choroid], C69.4 [ciliary body and iris], and C69.2 [retina]) derived from the Integrator Registry database. Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test was used for evaluation of normality of data, t-test and Chi square were used for categorical and continuous variables respectively using SPSS Software.
Main outcome measures: Age, sex, education, regional distribution, clinical staging at the diagnosis, time from diagnosis to treatment (≤ 60 days versus > 60 days) and first-course therapy (surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy or a combination of such).
Results: There were 2166 cases of uveal melanoma representing 5.4% of all cases of melanoma. Histological confirmation of uveal melanoma was available in all cases. Higher prevalence of 1139 cases (52.6%) in women than 1027 cases (47.4%) in men was observed. Age distribution revealed 1411 cases (65.1%) in the group between 41 and 69 years old. A total of 429 (19.8%) patients were classified as initial disease and 334 (15.4%) as advanced (regional or distant metastases). Staging as initial disease was more frequent (113-24.8%) in patients with > 8 school years than in patients with < 8 school years (179-17.6%) reflecting disparities in healthcare access between those two populations. No difference was noticed in terms of diagnosis, staging and treatment after the Brazilian "60 days law" (Federal Law 12.732/12) came into effect in 2013 regulating the maximum period that a patient with cancer has to wait until start the treatment.
Conclusion: Epidemiological data is critical for planning early treatment strategies and allocating medical resources. This study intended to understand the characteristics of uveal melanoma in Brazil.