Symptoms & Treatment For Bone Cancer

Bone cancer is a sarcoma that starts in the bone. Bones are the support system of the body, together forming a skeleton which gives us shape and posture. There are several types of bone cancers, the most serious being primary bone cancers.

Here are the symptoms of bone cancer:

• ​Swelling or lump under the skin, most often in the arm or leg

• Pain, if the tumor is pressing on muscles or nerves

• Bloody or black stools

• Abdominal discomfort

• Numbness or weakness in arm or leg

• Bone fractures

Symptoms For Soft Tissue Sarcoma:

The location of the sarcoma makes a difference in the symptoms. For instance, if they start:

• On the arms or legs, you may notice a lump that grows over a period of weeks to months. It may hurt, but it usually doesn’t.

• In the retroperitoneum (the back wall inside the abdomen), they may cause problems that have symptoms, such as pain. Tumors may cause blockage or bleeding of the stomach or bowels. They may grow large enough for the tumor to be felt in the abdomen.

Following are the treatments to cure bone cancer:

Surgery

Surgery is the main treatment for most sarcomas. The goal of surgery is to remove as much cancer as possible. If any cancer cells remain, they may grow and spread. To get as much of cancer as possible, the surgeon performs a wide-excision surgery. This involves removing cancer, as well as a margin of healthy tissue around it.

Radiation Therapy

New radiation therapy techniques and remarkable skill allow APCC doctors to target tumors more precisely, delivering the maximum amount of radiation with the least damage to healthy cells.

Proton Therapy

Proton therapy delivers high radiation doses directly into the tumor, sparing nearby healthy tissue and vital organs. Potentially higher doses of radiation and a low incidence of side effects are what make proton therapy an option worth considering for bone tumors, like osteosarcoma and Ewing sarcoma. In cases where complete removal of a bone tumor is not possible, proton therapy may be used to treat tumors without exposing surrounding tissues to high doses of radiation.

Targeted Therapy

These newer agents are used to help fight some types of sarcomas. Targeted therapies attack cancer cells by using small molecules to block pathways that cells use to survive and multiply.

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy may be recommended to treat osteosarcoma or Ewing’s sarcoma. In osteosarcoma, it is often given before surgery to shrink the tumor and make it easier to remove and after surgery to destroy remaining cancer cells. Chemotherapy is also used for bone cancer that has metastasized (spread) to the lungs or other organs.

For more information about the treatment of bone cancer visit Proton Cancer Centre.