Mortality from cutaneous malignant melanoma in Europe : has the epidemic levelled off?

Trends of mortality from cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM) between 1960 and 1999 in several European countries and the European Union (EU) as a whole have been reviewed, using death certification data for skin cancer available from the World Health Organization. Separate analyses were performed for young (i.e., age 20-44 years) and middle-aged (i.e., age 45-64 years) adults, among whom around 80-90% of skin cancer deaths are attributable to CMM. After steady rises between 1960 and 1990, skin cancer rates among young adults have tended to decline since the mid-1990s in several European countries, with a fall of 14% in men and of 11% in women in the EU as a whole. In middle-aged adults, the trends were less favourable, although mortality started to level off since the mid-1990s. Thus, our data provide further evidence of an improvement of CMM mortality trends in recent years in several European countries. The particularly favourable trends in young people suggest that a further decline in mortality from CMM in Europe is likely to occur within the next few years.