Prognostic factors in non-metastatic Ewing's sarcoma tumor of bone: an analysis of 579 patients treated at a single institution with adjuvant or neoadjuvant chemotherapy between 1972 and 1998.

We aimed to identify pretreatment and treatment factors that may influence the outcome of Ewing's sarcoma family tumors of bone and enable customized therapy for future studies with a retrospective analysis of 579 patients with non-metastatic Ewing's sarcoma treated with combined adjuvant or neoadjuvant chemotherapy at a single institution between 1972 and 1998. We evaluated the prognostic significance of gender, age, site and volume of tumor, serum level of LDH, type of local treatment, type of chemotherapy and histologic response to preoperative treatment. The 5- and 10-year disease-free survival rates were 56.9% and 49.2% respectively. Multivariate analyses showed that all the evaluated factors, with exclusion of the tumor site, were significantly correlated with the 5-year disease-free survival. We concluded that the outcome of non-metastatic ESF of bone tumors is influenced by many clinical and treatment-correlated variables. In order to gain the greatest benefit from treatment, while reducing the morbidity, appropriate therapeutic strategies for different risk groups of patients should be selected. Criteria to stratify patients according to the risk of local or systemic relapse should not be based on a single prognostic factor, but should include all the variables that showed prognostic significance.