Oncology

Saving Bone Cancer Patients' Limbs

Bone cancer is rare, but up till recently if it was diagnosed in a limb, it almost certainly meant an amputation.

But that has changed with the advent of internal prosthetics that can replace the diseased bone. Surgeons can now reconstruct a bone with prosthetics if a malignancy is not wrapped around blood vessels.

Dr. James Wittig of New York City's Mt. Sinai Medical Center says that, these days, 95 percent of patients with bone sarcomas, which comprise less than 1 percent of all cancers, can have their limbs saved. But some bone cancer sufferers may still be having amputations due to ignorance of the technology.

"Many physicians, and even the general public, are not aware of this disease entity and the options that exist," said Wittig. "So, unless they happen to encounter a physician who has access to an orthopedic oncologist or knows the specialty or knows someone in particular who practices this specialty and saves limbs, everybody is still under the impression from the old days that the extremity needs to be amputated."

Two patients' stories illustrate this new approach in the field of bone cancer. Fifteen-year-old Ryan Wenke, a high school tennis player diagnosed with osteosarcoma, said, "I had just been noticing this random pain in my knee, and I hadn't been playing tennis or anything. So it wasn't from an injury," recalled Wenke. "So we went to my doctor, who then told us to go to an orthopedist, and we had an MRI. And that's when we found out I had a tumor."

Twenty-five-year-old Chrystina Fischer, after feeling soreness in her shoulder, got a similar diagnosis. The physically active and relatively new mother of twin baby girls said, "I've been training horses since I was 16. The girls were born almost two years ago, and it was just, 'Well, I can hug [only] one [at a time] now,'" said Fischer, fighting back tears. "And, I just thought my whole life was going to change."

At first, the two patients' doctors told them their tumors would likely require amputations. But the Mt. Sinai Medical Center surgeons saved both limbs with internal prosthetic reconstruction to substitute for malignant bone tissue they removed.

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