Paget's sarcoma: a historical and outcome review.

UNLABELLED: Paget's sarcoma is a rare entity that principally occurs in elderly people with extensive Paget's disease. The primary sites of occurrence are the pelvis, proximal femur, proximal humerus, and calvarium. The lesions are highly malignant and the patients frequently are found to have metastases at the time of discovery. The survival rate reported in the literature generally is very poor. We were able to locate 16 patients with Paget's sarcoma in the Dr. Henry L. Jaffe Pathology Collection treated from 1942 to 1967. These were added to 27 patients treated for the disease by the Harvard Orthopaedic Oncology Group from 1972 to 2001. Three were giant cell tumors, which are occasionally found in patients with florid Paget's disease but are not malignant. Of the remaining 40 patients, outcome data were available on 35 patients. The rate of Musculoskeletal Tumor Society Stage III tumors was very high (35%) and the rate of survival was 14% at approximately 2.5 years, without differences between the two series. In view of the remarkable concordance in the poor survival figures for patients treated between 1946 and 1967 and those treated between 1972 and 2001 it appears that little progress has occurred in the treatment of Paget's sarcoma over the years, which is in sharp contrast with the current statistics for standard osteosarcoma. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Prognostic study, Level IV (case series). See the Guidelines for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.