There is an incredibly unsettling story coming out of the U.S. regarding a significant number of cases of ocular melanoma. The colored parts of your eye contain melanocytes, cells that provide pigment in various parts of your body. Cancer can arise in these cells, causing melanoma.
Ocular melanoma is even more rare than amelanotic nodular melanoma. It occurs in six out of a million people. That’s really freaking rare. But this cancer has been identified in more than 50 people and those people have two locations in common: Huntersville, North Carolina, and Auburn, Alabama. According to the news reports, nearly 80% of these individuals attended Auburn University between 1983 and 2001.
Now, experts are saying that there isn’t any proof of a cancer cluster, which is something that I’ve actually heard in relation to concerns in my hometown about the number of aggressive and unusual cancers in people who grew up there. (Side note, I know of about 40 people I went to high school with out of 600 people who had some form of cancer. One of the best female athletes ever to come out of our cohort died in her early 20s from a rare brain cancer and another died from an aggressive form of melanoma in his early 30s, to name a few – but the EPA claims that my tiny hometown doesn’t have a statistically unusual occurrence of cancer either, which makes me doubt stats sometimes…)
The official story is that “in order to meet the definition of a ‘cluster,’ you need to look at the expected incidence and observed incidence, and for a number of reasons it’s been hard to qualify these as true clusters”. So we won’t call it a cluster, although I do find it an odd coincidence that so many of the women who lived in close proximity to each other (and the vast majority of these identified patients are women) have the same diagnosis.
So, how do you treat this? Well, removal of the eye or radiation to the eye – both of which cause vision loss in that eye – are the standard. The other aspect of this type of melanoma is that when it metastasizes it heads to the liver. So patients may have to face additional surgery and radiation to shrink tumors there as well. Scary, but ocular melanoma is usually more deadly than cutaneous (skin-related) melanoma and there is no FDA-approved treatment for melanoma in the eye.
Experts aren’t really sure of the cause of this type of melanoma, which makes it hard for the people involved to really know what the heck happened here. Ocular melanoma isn’t usually tied to sun exposure, although you should always wear sunglasses, just in case because experts don’t have a clue about the mechanism behind this.
The symptoms of ocular melanoma are somewhat similar to those of a detached retina, which makes sense because a tumor can actually lift the retina off the eye: blurry vision, spots or “floaters” in your vision and vision loss. If you experience anything like this, definitely go get your eyes checked immediately. A detached retina is not exactly something you want to wait on getting corrected because that could cause blindness.
Hopefully there won’t be additional cases reported, but I’m actually pessimistic on that. But maybe people who live or previously lived in either of those two towns know about the potential for this and are proactive about getting regular eye exams.