The treatment of osteosarcoma of the extremities: twenty year's experience at the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli.

Twenty year's (1959-1979) experience in the treatment of osteosarcoma at the Bone Tumor Center of the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli is presented. During this period 433 cases were recorded, but only 266 were considered. All the patients underwent surgery but after 1970 whole-lung irradiation (1971), immunotherapy (1971), and chemotherapy (1972 onward) were added as adjuvant therapies on a nonrandomized basis. In the group treated with surgery alone the prognosis was very poor: 10% survived nine years or more after the diagnosis, an average disease-free interval of 7.7 months and an average survival time of 13 months. Monolateral whole-lung irradiation had negative results and was abandoned after six cases. Adjuvant immunotherapy with irradiated autologous tumor cells gave moderately positive results in 16 patients, but only by delaying the appearance of first metastases, therefore increasing the time of survival. Adjuvant chemotherapy was performed with three different protocols: one protocol with ADM only and two protocols using VCR + MTX (at medium dose) + ADM, administered according to two different schedules. Superimposable results were obtained with these three regimens. With equal follow-up, the percentage of continuously disease-free patients treated with adjuvant chemotherapy was significantly higher than that of patients treated with surgery alone (P less than 0.001). The patients in the chemotherapy group who had relapses showed a prolonged time (mean = 12.3 months) to the onset of the first metastasis. Adjuvant chemotherapy caused virtually no morbidity and no deaths. Reference is made to the advantages of a large and homogeneous caseload deriving from a single institution to avoid preselection bias and evaluate the effectiveness of new therapeutic approaches when patient randomization has not been employed.