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Evidence-Based Recommendations for Local Therapy for Soft Tissue Sarcomas

Peter W.T. Pisters, Brian O'Sullivan, Robert G. Maki

From the Department of Surgical Oncology, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX; Department of Radiation Oncology, Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and the Department of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

Address reprint requests to Peter W.T. Pisters, MD, Department of Surgical Oncology, Box 444, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Blvd, Houston, TX 77030-4009; e-mail:ppisters{at}mdanderson.org

There has been a gradual migration in the local treatment of soft tissue sarcomas from amputation and similar radical resectional approaches to more conservative, function-preserving surgery combined with radiotherapy. This progress has been made possible by small, single-institution, randomized trials that demonstrated the superiority of this more conservative, combined-modality approach. In the new millennium, attention has shifted to defining subsets of patients who might be adequately treated by surgery alone and defining the optimal sequence of surgery and radiation for patients who require both types of local therapy. There remains considerable discussion and debate surrounding the issue of pre- and postoperative chemotherapy for patients with localized soft tissue sarcomas. Adjuvant chemotherapy is a standard of care for adults who have the subtypes of soft tissue sarcomas that typically occur in pediatric patients (Ewing sarcoma, rhabdomyosarcoma), and just as clearly, adjuvant chemotherapy is not warranted in patients with low- and intermediate-risk disease (stages I and II). For patients with higher risk disease (stage III), the available randomized trials do not convincingly demonstrate a clinical benefit to adjuvant chemotherapy. As such, a complete accounting of potential risks and benefits is appropriate when discussing adjuvant chemotherapy with patients who have stage III disease.

Authors' disclosures of potential conflicts of interest and author contributions are found at the end of this article.

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