Hello!
To come up to speed on sarcoma, let’s start at the 100,000 foot level.
Cancer “families” are named after the type of cell it originates from.
To date, there are 5 major families of cancer:
Carcinoma comes from the epithelial cells. This is what most of us think of cancer, like the more frequent lung and breast cancers.
Lymphoma & Leukemia is from cells in the immune system & blood.
Germ Cell is from the pluripotent cells, usually in the reproductive organs.
Blastoma is from immature “precursor” cells and is usually found in children.
And Sarcoma. It is a family of cancers originating from the body’s mesenchymal cells, the connective tissues in skin, fat, blood, or bone. In this family, there are 50, 80, or 120, or 150, maybe even 180, different types of tumors. Nobody knows for sure. They keep discovering new ones. Like the one I had. 🙁
There you go. That is a high-level technical answer to what sarcoma is.
Happy? I wasn’t!
Here are some practical things I discovered in my journey.
Five Practical Things about Sarcoma
Sarcomas “types” are generally named <cell origin> + Sarcoma.
Examples:
Osteo (bone)-sarcoma
Rhabdomyo (skeletal muscle)-sarcoma
Soft Tissue Sarcoma (STS) is a catch-all name for long names or unknown types.
Note that sarcomas are loosely separated into two parts: bone and soft tissue.
Sarcoma is on the Rare Side.
Approximately 1% of all cancer diagnoses in a year are Sarcoma. That’s 1 in 100, or presented graphically below, created with a 10 pixel line and a 1,000 pixel line (there may be some web browser scaling).
Sarcoma is a frontier cancer. The rarity of Sarcoma heavily impacts about everything: a lack-of-knowledge about sarcomas, treatment, treatment locations, type of doctors and nurses, research funding, support groups, etc.
The American Cancer Society reports in their Cancer Facts and Figures for 2022 that they were about 1.9 million new cancer diagnoses. In their list of type of cancer diagnoses, they didn’t bother to separate out sarcoma. That’s how rare sarcoma is. It doesn’t even make the largest cancer organization’s list. 🙁
Sarcoma Cancer Makes its Own Rules
This means treatment approaches used in other cancer families may have limited impact or make matters worse. An example of this is that tumor removal methods are different for sarcoma than the more frequency cancers. Improper tumor removal spreads sarcoma in the body. <1> Also, classic chemotherapy does not work for certain types of sarcoma. Like mine. However, new immunotherapy and targeted drugs look very promising.
Cancer Staging for Sarcoma is a Work in Progress.
Cancer staging is an important tool for doctors to select the most appropriate treatment. However, the staging process is not straightforward. Often, for Sarcomas, especially soft-tissue Sarcoma, they use the “TNM system”. <2> The letters stand for Tumor size, cancer in lymph Nodes, Metastasis, plus the cancer aggressiveness Grade (G). Each letter gets a score, then there is a mapping into the more familiar cancer Stage 1-4 system. A high-Grade cancer score automatically goes to Stage 2 or Stage 3 regardless if the cancer has spread or not.
Determining the cancer stage can be tricky. In my case, I found the tumor lump early and under the Stage 1-4 system it came out as Stage 1. But in the TNM system, I had a high-Grade tumor that immediately bumped me into Stage 3. My doctors didn’t mess around with a Stage 3 diagnosis and I started treatment within weeks.
The Best Place for Positive Treatment Outcomes is at a Sarcoma Cancer Center.
Since sarcoma cancer is rare, has staging trickiness, and it makes its own rules, there are numerous benefits of seeing doctors at a sarcoma cancer center. These experts deal with sarcoma daily and know how nasty sarcoma can be. They often talk to other sarcoma centers and are on the frontier of sarcoma knowledge and treatments.
Studies have shown that receiving treatment at a sarcoma center improves survival rates.
Click here for the Sarcoma Alliance’s list of Sarcoma Centers in America
Sarcoma Research has Attracted Talented Researchers and Doctors.
The sarcoma medical field is advancing quickly, and that’s a good thing. The number of research papers released on the PubMed website <3> has greatly increased since 2012 and in 2022 there were 7,065 papers published. This is incredible since 1940, when only 8 papers were published.
<1> “Diagnosis and Management of Subcutaneous Soft Tissue Sarcoma” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31129726/
<2> “Soft Tissue Sarcoma Staging” https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/soft-tissue-sarcoma/detection-diagnosis-staging/staging.html
<3> PubMed website: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
The post “What is Sarcoma” by Scott R. Weaver first appeared on the Arise2Live.com website in October 2023.
