Impact of improved local control on survival in patients with soft tissue sarcoma.

An estimate has been made of the gain in survival if the local failure rate for sarcoma of soft tissue was reduced to zero by the application of new treatment methods. The assumption is that the loss, due to distant metastasis and intercurrent disease among patients who achieve local control by the current treatment, would be the same among new local controls. For patients with stage M0 disease at diagnosis (all sites, all histological types), the current local failure rate is approximately 30%. By eliminating these failures, the overall survival rate would be expected to increase by 10-20 percentage points.