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Sarcoma Cancer Awareness Month
July is Sarcoma Cancer Awareness Month. This annual initiative strives to raise awareness about what is considered the "forgotten cancer" and to encourage research and drug development surrounding this rare disease. The two main types of sarcomas are soft tissue sarcoma and bone sarcoma, specifically osteosarcoma.
Despite the limitations of sarcoma epidemiologic analyses due to the disease's heterogeneity and rarity, evidence-based findings from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program and the National Cancer Database (NCDB) identified racial disparities in sarcoma-specific outcomes and survival. For example, the large databases reveal that African Americans had the highest five-year risk of death and were less likely to receive adjuvant radiation with surgery than white, Hispanic, and Asian patients (Lazarides, Visgauss, Nussbaum, et al., 2018). Additionally, a 2021 study published in Surgical Oncology found that socioeconomic factors are associated with amputation for extremity bone sarcomas. For example, those with an annual household income lower than $75k yearly treated in public hospitals with lower extremity sarcoma were at greater risk for amputation than those with an annual income of $125k yearly with upper extremity sarcoma. Also, the data from the Surgical Oncology study indicated patients with higher annual income and upper extremity sarcomas had limb surgery salvage surgery (Houdek et al., 2021).
With the differences in the treatment and survival of sarcoma patients, future studies are essential to ensure adequate access to effective treatment for all patients regardless of race, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status. In addition, improvement in cancer treatment outcomes requires complex diagnostic and treatment procedures given by multidisciplinary teams, emphasizing the need for community partnerships, especially for rare tumors, such as sarcomas (Biermann, Chugh, Siegel, et al., 2015), (Diessner, Weigel, Murugan, et al., 2020).
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