EWING SARCOMA OF THE PELVIS - CLINICOPATHOLOGICAL FEATURES AND TREATMENT

The results of treatment in twenty-seven patients who had a Ewing sarc oma of the pelvis were reviewed. Six patients had had metastatic disea se at the time of the diagnosis. The three-year actuarial survival of these patients was 17 per cent (95 per cent confidence interval, 8 to 52 per cent). Of the twenty-one remaining patients, thirteen had recei ved chemotherapy and radiation therapy to the primary lesion and eight had had chemotherapy and operative resection, with or without radiati on therapy. The actuarial five-year over-all survival was 25 per cent (95 per cent confidence interval, 6 to 51 per cent) in the group that had had radiation without a resection and 75 per cent (95 per cent con fidence interval, 31 to 93 per cent) in the group that had had a resec tion (p < 0.005, log-rank method). The actuarial over-all rive-year su rvival was 45 per cent (23 to 65 per cent) for all patients who had ha d localized disease when first seen. Actuarial local failure analysis (the censoring of patients who died without evidence of local failure before the two-year follow-up examination) revealed a rate of local fa ilure of 44 per cent (14 to 79 per cent) in the group that had been tr eated with chemotherapy and radiation alone compared with 13 per cent (0 to 53 per cent) in the patients who had had a resection, but this d ifference was not significant (p > 0.25, log-rank method). A sarcoma d eveloped, nine years after treatment, in one of the six patients who h ad received a course of radiation and had survived for five years.