Length of symptoms before referral: prognostic variable for high-grade soft tissue sarcoma?

Background: It is commonly assumed patients with high-grade soft tissue sarcomas who are diagnosed and treated quickly after the first onset of symptoms fare better than those with longer symptoms before treatment. The literature contains no substantive data to support this assumption for soft tissue sarcomas, particularly for high-grade lesions.

Questions/purposes: We examined selected potential prognostic factors for high-grade soft tissue sarcoma and determined whether the time from first symptom to diagnosis has an impact on survival or disease-free survival and whether subcutaneous sarcomas are diagnosed more quickly than deep sarcomas.

Biopsy of soft tissue masses: evidence-based medicine for the musculoskeletal tumor society.

Unlabelled: The literature contains a number of controversies regarding key questions: (1) When is a biopsy indicated? (2) How should the biopsy be placed? (3) How should the biopsy be performed and which has the greatest diagnostic accuracy? (4) Who should perform the biopsy? (5) What clinical parameters present the greatest diagnostic difficulty? Using PubMed and Google Scholar we performed English-language literature searches of clinical studies reporting biopsy of soft tissue masses. Thirty-two studies met the inclusion criteria but were only able to address three of the five questions the authors had hoped to evaluate. Available evidence suggests open biopsy has the highest diagnostic accuracy over core needle biopsy, which was higher than fine needle aspiration.

Diagnosis and treatment of joint-related tumors that mimic sports-related injuries.

Tumors involving the joint or having symptoms in the joint are rare. Both joint-related tumors and sports-related injuries can affect young, active patients, and their symptoms often overlap. Sports medicine specialists rarely encounter synovial conditions, so expertise in this area is difficult to establish.

Tumors masquerading as hematomas.

Suboptimal patient management can occur when malignant soft tissue tumors with internal hemorrhage masquerade as simple hematomas. We retrospectively reviewed 31 patients with malignancies who had diagnostic delays averaging 6.7 months (range, 1.