Bone cancer can be found both in the spine and the pelvic extremities. There are 2 main types of bone cancer as follows:
- Primary Bone Cancer
This type of cancer results from when cells in the body divide abnormally to the point of becoming malignant tumors. This condition can be encountered in both children and adults. Patients often visit their doctors after palpating and discovering lumps along their bodies, experiencing pain or broken bones or accidentally encountering the condition. For example, they might discover osteosarcoma.
- Secondary Bone Cancer / Bone Metastasis
This commonly occurs in patients who already have a cancer, such as breast cancer, lung cancer, thyroid cancer, kidney cancer or multiple myeloma that has spread to the bones. If these patients experience bone pain and preliminary treatment fails to improve symptoms, patients should seek a bone cancer specialist for additional examinations.
Bone Cancer Symptoms
Bone cancer can occur in any bone, but it most commonly occurs in the spine, which can cause the spine to break or for tumors to put pressure on the spinal cord or nerves. Patients might be able to palpate and feel lumps and experience pain that radiates to their arms or legs. Sometimes, they might also experience numbness or weakness of the limbs, and delayed treatment can cause urinary and fecal incontinence problems. Meanwhile, the next locations where this type of cancer is often encountered are the pelvis and the bones of the arms and legs. Patients often experience pain symptoms that might occur at night or whenever they move or change postures such as by standing or walking. Sometimes patients can detect lumps after palpating. If the condition is left untreated, broken bones can occur, which generally worsens treatment outcomes, especially if it is primary bone cancer.
What are the symptoms to cause suspicion of bone cancer?
- Detection of lumps after palpation.
- Presence of other cancers like breast cancer and lung cancer and bone pain symptoms that do not improve after preliminary treatment or chronic pain.
- Excessive bone pain and numbness or weakness of the arms and legs.
- Weight loss and fatigue without a known cause.
- Accidental discovery.
How is bone cancer diagnosed?
Preliminarily, doctors will ask about symptoms and perform a physical examination at the site of the abnormality and might potentially perform additional diagnostics like the following:
- Plain x-rays.
- MRI scan.
- CT scan.
- Bone scan or PET/CT scan.
What are the possible diagnoses aside from bone cancer?
- Bone infection potentially occurring in the spine (TB/bacterial spondylitis) or pelvis or the limbs (osteomyelitis).
- Spinal cord tumor.
- Benign bone tumor / Tumor-like masses.
- Cervical spondylosis or lumbar spondylosis degenerating due to age.
- Osteoporotic vertebral fracture.
- Soft tissue tumor.
- And others like paraspinal cyst / bursitis, paraspinal nerve sheath tumor and vascular tumor.
How can bone cancer be treated?
The treatment of bone cancer depends on the type and stage of the disease.
- If primary malignant bone tumor is discovered quickly without signs of cancer cell metastasis, there is a chance that surgery will cure the condition. The medical team might consider administering chemotherapy and radiotherapy as appropriate to each person’s case and potentially perform surgery to remove the entire cancerous tumor to eliminate cancer cell
- For cancer caused by other organs (bone metastasis), the treatment objective is to improve patient quality of life while reducing pain and complications to allow patients to care for themselves as normally as possible.
The first surgery is the most crucial for bone cancer.
Surgery is an appropriate treatment method that can cure primary bone cancer. However, if the surgery is performed incorrectly, the risk of recurrent malignant tumors is very high. Moreover, there is almost no chance for corrective surgery, since this is caused by contamination by cancer cells at the site of surgery.
A multidisciplinary team and modern surgical technology are essential to treatment outcomes.
Bone cancer treatment has to be administered by a team of medical specialists like oncologists, hematologists, surgeons, therapeutic radiologists, diagnostic radiologists, pathologists and others. The medical team will work together to diagnose and plan treatment to produce the best treatment outcome for each patient.
Phyathai 2 Hospital is equipped with a medical specialist team and modern surgical technologies and instruments. We have a surgeon who specializes in general spinal surgery and spinal cancer who is officially certified with a postdoctoral fellowship in spinal surgery from The Johns Hopkins Hospital in the United States of America, and our advanced surgical equipment and operating room will give confidence to our patients that they will receive appropriate treatment by using the appropriate techniques in order to produce the best results for them and their relatives.