Can benign bone tumors be left untreated?

Tumors are an increasingly common disease in our lives. This disease is extremely harmful and is almost incurable among modern diseases. It also causes great harm to patients and has a very high mortality rate. However, tumors are divided into benign and malignant. Among them, benign tumors are less harmful and can be treated and cured. Let’s take bone tumors as an example to see if benign bone tumors can be left untreated?

Benign tumors also need to be treated and must be taken seriously, otherwise they will cause great harm.

Surgical resection is the mainstay of treatment. Amputation and joint separation are the most commonly used methods. However, due to the advancement of chemotherapy methods, some scholars have begun to perform tumor segment resection or total femoral resection and replace it with an artificial prosthesis in recent years. It is said that the short-term effect is good, but the long-term effect is still poor. For tumors with a relatively low degree of malignancy, such as fibrosarcoma, it is an advisable approach to adopt limb-preserving "wide local resection plus functional reconstruction" supplemented with chemotherapy and other measures. As for the use of cadaveric joints as replacement materials, some authors believe that "healing is satisfactory", but some cases have shown significant rejection reactions, which still need to be studied and overcome.

Chemotherapy is divided into systemic chemotherapy and local chemotherapy. Commonly used drugs include doxorubicin and high-dose methotrexate, but the drugs are not very selective and tumor cells are not synchronized in the division cycle, which affects the effectiveness of chemotherapy. Using monoclonal antibodies to carry drugs and selectively attack tumor cells (the "missile method") is only a concept and is still far from practical application.

Local chemotherapy includes continuous intra-arterial chemotherapy and regional perfusion. Regional perfusion has better effects and improves the five-year survival rate, but it cannot achieve the effect of complete "chemical amputation". In the future, further research is needed to improve the perfusion method, such as the rational combination of drugs, the selection of the most suitable temperature of the perfusion fluid, the timing of radical surgery after perfusion, etc., all of which need to be explored in depth to make it more and more perfect.

Immunotherapy: It is still at the stage of non-specific immunotherapy. Because tumor antigens are a complex issue, there is no ideal specific immunotherapy yet. The application scope of interferon is also constantly expanding, but its source is limited and it cannot be widely used.

Radiotherapy can only be used as an auxiliary treatment for bone tumors, and there are some improvements (such as the effects of fast neutrons, radiofrequency, etc.).