Musculo-skeletal tumors incidence and surgical treatment - A single center 5-year retrospective

OBJECTIVE: Muscle-skeletal tumors represent a challenging pathology for orthopedic surgeons worldwide. The extremely invasive character, the local destruction, the high recurrence rate, the high incidence in young patients and the unfavorable prognosis are all very well known. For these patients it is very important to produce an accelerated functional, social and psychological postoperative rehabilitation. We studied 121 cases of muscle-skeletal tumors which were treated in our hospital over a 5 years period. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We noticed a high prevalence in males and mainly between the 2nd-3rd and 5th-7th decades of their life. At our observation, most patients were suffering in advanced stages of malignant lesions. RESULTS: We try to manage amputations below 5%, with a significant reduction in introducing reconstructive surgical methods as a choice of treatment (10 prostheses and 12 cases of filling with acrylic cement or bone substituent increased with internal fixation). In this way we could observe an unusual ratio between benign and malignant tumors, probably caused by the patient's lack of concern for minimal symptoms. The rural citizen's addressability towards the medical system is alarmingly low, due to the big gap existing from diagnosis to treatment. CONCLUSIONS: There is still an hard effort to develop better reconstructive techniques for the treatment of muscle-skeletal tumors and more studies must be made in order to achieve this goal.