Straightforward trustworthy advice for malignant melanoma patients and carers
Frequently Asked Questions: What is sentinel node biopsy?
Sentinel node biopsy (SNB)is one way of seeing if the melanoma has spread. It can give you a better idea of whether your melanoma is likely to recur or not.
After they cut out the original melanoma for testing (biopsy), doctors can inject you with a blue dye and a tracer material to see which lymph node is closest to the melanoma. They can cut this node out, and see if it has any cancer in it. This allows them to predict your survival chances more accurately than waiting to see if a lymph node gets enough cancer in it to feel a lump through the skin.
You can have side effects from the operation, and whilst NICE recognise it as potentially useful to see if the cancer has spread, claims that it might cure some people are highly controversial.
Ultrasound can be used in combination with the same tracer material as SNB to identify almost as small a bit of spreading cancer as SNB can. It is claimed that the smaller particles of cancer which SNB can see will not develop into more widespread cancer anyway, and that the possible side effects of SNB are therefore not justified.