Prevention and screening of melanoma in Europe: 20 years of the Euromelanoma campaign

Abstract

Euromelanoma is a Europe-wide, dermatologist-led organization that campaigns to have a public, scientific, and political impact on raising awareness of the prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment of skin cancer. The organization raises public awareness of skin cancer by providing practical support to participating countries for the roll out of yearly screening campaigns, and then builds on these campaigns by providing resources via its website to educate the general public on key skin cancer prevention measures, risk factors, and the importance of recognizing abnormal lesions through self-examination. Euromelanoma also provides a valuable platform for the scientific community, facilitating collaborations between countries and coordinating the collection of standardized data on the epidemiology, demographic and clinical characteristics, and risk factors for all forms of skin cancer. As our scientific understanding of skin cancer advances, Euromelanoma plays a key role in ensuring that the importance of skin cancer prevention, treatment, and diagnosis remains at the forefront of European and national healthcare policies. Since its creation in 1999, Euromelanoma has continued to evolve, adapt, and expand its approach to achieve these public, scientific, and political goals: the organization now has networks of dermatologists working in over 30 countries and has screened and gathered skin cancer data from around 420 000 subjects. This review highlights these achievements by providing an outline of the history of Euromelanoma and the benefits of the first decade of action and by describing the evolving approach over the past 20 years. Future Euromelanoma projects, which aim to evaluate skin cancer risk in specific populations (outdoor workers, organ transplant recipients, etc.) are also introduced, and current challenges for the Euromelanoma campaign are discussed, including the need to improve reporting of non-melanoma skin cancer cases and to raise awareness of melanoma subtypes, particularly the more difficult to diagnose nodular melanoma form.

Keywords: Euromelanoma; campaign; prevention; screening; skin cancer.