摘要：Cutaneous malignant melanoma occurs much less frequently among non-white populationsthan among white populations. Little is known of the descriptive epidemiology of melanomaamong Japanese. We investigated time trends of incidence of invasive cutaneous malignantmelanoma using data from the Osaka Cancer Registry (Japan) among 321 men and 313 womendiagnosed between 1964-95. Average, annual, age-standardized incidence rates per 1, 000, 000population were 2.45 (95% confidence interval (CI): 2.17-2.72) for men and 2.04 (95% Cl : 1.81-2.28) for women. The age-standardized rate ratio among men from 1964-71 as a reference wasalmost constant during the study period, whereas that among women increased up to 1.8 fold(95% CI : 1.25-2.56) in 1980-87 and seems to have reached a plateau recently. Among men, theratio for head and neck lesions decreased to 0.5 fold (95% Cl : 0.26-0.99) in 1988-95. Amongwomen, the ratio for lesions of the extremities steeply increased up to 4.7 fold (95% CI : 2.68-8.35) in 1980-87 from the reference period of 1964-71, whereas a slight increase for trunk lesionsand no increase for head and neck lesions were noted during the same period. Possibleexplanations for the subsite-specific time trends are discussed.J Epidemiol, 1999 ; 9 : S129-S135.
