Tumors



Tumors


Alexandre Arkader, MD

John M. (Jack) Flynn, MD

Kristy L. Weber, MD1


1Guru:











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General Considerations

Rule number 1 of medicine is “Do no harm,” and rule number 1 of orthopaedic oncology should be “Be aware of the zebras.” While bone and soft tissue tumors are rare conditions, in particular in children, they will find you regardless of what your subspecialty interest may be. The incidence of cancer in the United States for 2018 was around 1.7 million. There were approximately 3500 new cases of bone and soft tissue malignant tumors, corresponding to 0.2% of the total, and only 25% of these were in patients younger than 20 years.1 So you may ask yourself, why do I need to know about something so uncommon? Because orthopaedic surgeons are usually the first line of defense after pediatricians and primary care physicians for evaluation of these lesions. Furthermore, benign conditions are at least 10 times as common as malignancies. Therefore, in order to stay out of trouble, one should be comfortable diagnosing and managing the most common benign conditions, but at the same time comfortably recognize the “imitators”, the “no touch” lesions and malignancies, avoiding burning bridges and impacting prognosis in a negative way. While the goal of this chapter is not to provide detailed comprehensive management of musculoskeletal tumors, we will review the basic principles and highlight areas of “caution” when evaluating one of these lesions.



Jan 30, 2021 | Posted by in ORTHOPEDIC | Comments Off on Tumors

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