“Of all the types of skin cancers this is the one we worry most about,” says John Zampella, MD, an assistant professor of dermatology at the Ronald O. Perlman Department of Dermatology at NYU Langone Health.
That’s because melanoma, if not diagnosed and treated early (when it’s almost always curable), can spread to other parts of the body, becoming hard to treat and potentially deadly. Although melanoma is not the most common type of skin cancer—that title belongs to basal cell carcinoma—it is the one that causes the most deaths, killing one person every hour of every day. About 7,000 are expected to die of it this year.
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