3.3 Ulceration is associated with worse progression free survival
There is extensive literature demonstrating that ulceration carries a poor prognosis in cutaneous melanoma. We generated a Kaplan-Meier progression free survival (PFS) curve stratified by ulceration to verify that our study population recapitulates this finding. As expected, our results indicated that the presence of ulceration at biopsy was associated with significantly worse PFS (p=0.002) than the lack of ulceration (Fig. 1 ). The 5-year PFS for non-ulcerated patients was 72.7% while only 47.9% for ulcerated patients.