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Soft tissue sarcoma associated with threefold increase in incidence of lymphoma or leukemia
Katz SC. Cancer. 2011;doi:10.1002/cncr.26105.
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A review of databases for sarcoma, gastric, urology, breast and gynecology cancers showed that patients diagnosed with soft tissue sarcomas developed lymphoma at three times the rate of patients with other solid tumors.
Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center analyzed data on 8,240 patients treated for soft tissue sarcomas from 1982 to 2009. Subsequently, 135 of these patients were diagnosed with lymphoma or leukemia. The conclusions of this study are based on an analysis of 112 patients.
Data on 100,904 patients treated for non-sarcomas were included as a control.
Researchers found that incidence of lymphoma or leukemia was significantly higher in soft tissue sarcoma patients compared with other neoplasms (OR=3.1; 95% CI, 2.6-3.8). Lymphoma or leukemia was diagnosed in 1.6% of soft tissue sarcoma patients compared with 0.5% of all patients in the gastric, urology, gynecology and breast databases.
Researchers then compared patients diagnosed with sarcoma and lymphoma against patients diagnosed with sarcoma alone. They concluded that patients with sarcoma alone were significantly more likely to have tumors larger than 10 cm, high histological grade and recurrent or metastatic disease.
Katz and colleagues then evaluated OS and disease-specific survival for patients diagnosed with sarcoma first vs. those diagnosed with lymphoma first. Median OS for the sarcoma-first group was 170 months vs. 67 months for the lymphoma-first group. At 10 years, there were no deaths caused by sarcoma in the sarcoma-first group, whereas almost 50% of patients in the lymphoma-first group died of sarcoma.
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