Demographic characteristics and prognostic factors in pediatric-type sarcomas; A 7 year single institutional experience and comprehensive review of the current literature

Background: due to limited clinical data in pediatric-type sarcomas(rhabdomyosarcoma, ewing's sarcoma, pnet, and desmoplastic small round-celltumor), the aim of this study was to evaluate the demographic characteristics andidentifying prognostic factors for survival. materials and methods: weretrospectively reviewed 110 patients with pediatric-type sarcomas. overall anddisease free survival was analyzed with the kaplan-meier method and log rank test.to identify prognostic factors for overall and disease free survival, multivariatesurvival analyses using a cox’s proportional-hazard regression model wasperformed. results: in this study mean age of patients were 20.30 years(sd=13.61; range, 1–83 years). the survival data of 54 patients (49.1%) wereobtained with median survival of 27 months. 3 and 5-year survival rate ofthese patients were 41.5% and 28.3% respectively. recurrence of disease(p=0.006) and ewing sarcoma subtype (p=0.018) were significantly associatedwith poor overall survival and location of the lesion in the upper extremities(p=0.007) and trunk (p=0.005) were significantly associated with a lowerdisease free survival. conclusion: with multivariate analysis, the authorsdetermined that recurrence of disease and ewing's sarcoma subtype are poorprognostic factors for overall survival and site of origin for disease free survivalamong patients with pediatric-type sarcoma. in addition, gender, patient's age, andsize of tumor had no significant impact on overall and disease free survival.