The survival of osteosarcoma patients 10 years old or younger is not worse than the survival of older patients: a retrospective analysis

Abstract

Purpose: This study aimed to assess whether a young age at the time of diagnosis with osteosarcoma has value to predict the prognosis.

Materials and methods: Sixty-seven children with stage II osteosarcoma were stratified according to the age of 10. There were 32 preadolescents (<or=10 years) and 35 adolescents (10<age<or=15 years). The patients were analyzed for their clinical characteristics, the histologic response to preoperative chemotherapy, event-free survival (EFS) and the patterns of relapse.

Results: After a median follow-up of 54 months (range: 6 approximately 153 months), the 5-year EFS of the preadolescent and adolescent groups was 64.5+/-9.3% and 58.2+/-9.1%, respectively, and age did not have any statistical significance for survival (p=0.55). Cox regression analysis revealed that both the serum level of alkaline phosphatase and the histologic response to preoperative chemotherapy were significantly related to survival of the 67 patients. Those patients aged less than 7 years responded poorly to preoperative chemotherapy and their rate of amputation was 43%. However, their 5-year EFS was not statistically different from the older patients (57.1+/-18.7 vs 67.7+/-6.3%, respectively, p=0.58).

Conclusions: We could not find any statistical difference in the clinical characteristics and survival from osteosarcoma for the preadolescents and adolescents, so the current approach of having the same protocol for both groups of patients seems to be reasonable.

Keywords: Age; Osteosarcoma; Preadolescents; Prognosis.

Fig. 1

Comparison of overall (OS) and event-free free survival (EFS) of patients according ages. There were no survival difference between preadolescents and adolescents.