In 1989, Partoff and associates⁴³ wrote of their attempt to determine the incidence of melanoma in children 14 years old and younger who were enrolled in the Danish Cancer Registry between 1943 and 1982. Although medical records and tissue sections were not available for review, Partoff et al. were able to identify nine such patients. This is some of what they wrote about them:

In a work published in 1990 under the title, "Melanoma in children," Roth and colleagues,⁴⁵ reported on melanoma in four children aged 16, 4, 12, and 15 (their cases 1 through 4, respectively). In three of those children, the melanoma supposedly arose in a pre-existing nevus. A 16-year-old girl (Case 1) had a melanoma that apparently began de novo on the left flank and was described as being "nodular or polypoid type," at least 2.0 mm in thickness. She subsequently developed signs of metastases to lymph nodes and to bone, and died 11 months later. Three photomicrographs of that melanoma were shown, but only at high magnification. A 4-year-old girl (Case 2) had a "superficial spreading melanoma," 0.52 mm thick on the left thigh. No photomicrographs were published and no comment was made about whether or not the melanoma was present in conjunction with a nevus, but Roth and coworkers claimed nonetheless that the melanoma was congenital. No metastasis had become manifest by the time the article was in print. A 12-year-old girl (Case 3) with multiple nevi had excised from her back what was thought to be melanoma in situ and therefore was free of any sign of metastatic disease. A melanoma that measured 0.35 mm in thickness was excised from the right scapula of a 15-year-old boy (Case 4) who had "several dysplastic nevi." He seemed to be free of metastases. Based on their observations of these four patients, Roth and coworkers summarized their thoughts as follows: