Sarcoma: A lesser known cancer that mostly affects children
Sarcoma is a soft-tissue cancer that may occur in a variety of the body’s soft tissues, including the nerves, muscles, joints, blood vessels, fat, bones and more.
Although rare in adults, making up just one per cent of adult cancers, sarcoma is relatively common in children, accounting for 15 per cent of childhood cancer cases.
Since sarcoma is rare cancer, many people are unfamiliar with the disease. However, many children’s lives have been altered because of this disease.
They can be found in any part of the body — most of the time, it starts in the arms or legs. They can also be found in the trunk, head and neck area, internal organs, and the area in back of the abdominal cavity (known as the retroperitoneum). There are more than 50 sub-types of sarcoma.
The causes of sarcoma are unknown, but there are some known risk factors are chemical exposure, therapeutic radiation exposure, lymphoedema, and hereditary cancer syndromes.
Symptoms include swelling/ lump anywhere in the body. In the early stages, painless swelling, unexplained pain, unexplained weight loss, persistent fever, unexplained bleeding from natural orifices — stool, urine, vomiting etc, any other symptoms or findings can be present.
After a detailed history and physical examination, the oncologist will suggest a few tests to confirm the disease. These generally include a biopsy of swelling, imaging like CT or PET-CT or MRI scan, USG, chest Xray endoscopy and blood tests. There are new molecular tests also available now for proper diagnosis and therapy guidance.
The stages of soft tissue sarcomas range from stages I through IV. As a rule, the lower the number, the less cancer has spread. A higher number, such as Stage IV, means cancer has spread more. Also the chances of curing the disease reduce as the stage advances which is around 80 per cent for early stages and around 10 per cent for very advanced stages.
The main types of treatment for soft tissue sarcoma are:
> Surgery
> Radiation
> Chemotherapy
> Targeted therapy
Depending on the stage of the disease and patients’ physical fitness, treatment options can vary from one modality in the very early stages to multi-modality in ad- vanced stages. Proper planning is a crucial step in starting the treatment as that can improve the chances of cure and reduce the side-effects of treatment.
This requires continues collaboration between surgical, medical and radiation oncologists. Many new targeted drugs are also used now for different sarcomas particularly for advanced stages with very good results.
Dr Arun Karanwal is a specialist
medical oncologist at International Modern Hospital (This article has been sponsored by the advertiser)