Treatment of bone tumors is dependent on the type of tumor. There is a variety of chemotherapy treatment protocols for bone tumors. The protocol with the best-reported survival in children and adults is an intra-arterial protocol where tumor response is tracked by serial arteriogram. When tumor response has reached >90% necrosis surgical intervention is planned.
Medication One of the major concerns is bone density and bone loss. Non-hormonal
bisphosphonates increase bone strength and are available as once-a-week prescription pills.
Strontium-89 chloride is an intravenous medication given to help with the pain and can be given in three-month intervals.
Surgical treatment Treatment for some bone cancers may involve
surgery, such as limb
amputation, or limb sparing surgery (often in combination with
chemotherapy and
radiation therapy).
Limb sparing surgery, or limb salvage surgery, means the
limb is spared from
amputation. Instead of amputation, the affected bone is removed and replaced in one of two ways: (a)
bone graft, in which bone is taken from elsewhere on the body or (b)
artificial bone is put in. In upper leg surgeries, limb salvage prostheses are available. There are other joint preservation surgical reconstruction options, including allograft, tumor-devitalized autograft, vascularized fibula graft,
distraction osteogenesis, and custom-made implants. An analysis of massive knee replacements after resection of primary bone tumours showed patients did not score as highly on the Musculoskeletal Tumour Society Score and Knee Society Score as patients who had undergone intra-articular resection.
Thermal ablation techniques Over the past two decades, CT guided
radiofrequency ablation has emerged as a less invasive alternative to surgical resection in the care of benign bone tumors, most notably
osteoid osteomas. In this technique, which can be performed under conscious sedation, a RF probe is introduced into the tumor nidus through a cannulated needle under CT guidance and heat is applied locally to destroy tumor cells. Since the procedure was first introduced for the treatment of osteoid osteomas in the early 1990s, it has been shown in numerous studies to be less invasive and expensive, to result in less bone destruction and to have equivalent safety and efficacy to surgical techniques, with 66 to 96% of patients reporting freedom from symptoms. While initial success rates with RFA are high, symptom recurrence after RFA treatment has been reported, with some studies demonstrating a recurrence rate similar to that of surgical treatment. Thermal ablation techniques are also increasingly being used in the palliative treatment of painful metastatic bone disease. Currently, external beam radiation therapy is the standard of care for patients with localized bone pain due to metastatic disease. Although the majority of patients experience complete or partial relief of pain following radiation therapy, the effect is not immediate and has been shown in some studies to be transient in more than half of patients. For patients who are not eligible or do not respond to traditional therapies ( i.e. radiation therapy, chemotherapy, palliative surgery, bisphosphonates or analgesic medications), thermal ablation techniques have been explored as alternatives for pain reduction. Several multi-center clinical trials studying the efficacy of RFA in the treatment of moderate to severe pain in patients with metastatic bone disease have shown significant decreases in patient reported pain after treatment. These studies are limited however to patients with one or two metastatic sites; pain from multiple tumors can be difficult to localize for directed therapy. More recently,
cryoablation has also been explored as a potentially effective alternative as the area of destruction created by this technique can be monitored more effectively by CT than RFA, a potential advantage when treating tumors adjacent to critical structures. ==Prognosis==