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.