Survival for patients diagnosed with Osteosarcoma before chemotherapy treatments in the late 1970s, early 1980s was dismal. Most patients died of their disease and survival was less than 20% at 5-years from the time of diagnosis. Then came multi-agent aggressive chemotherapy in the 1980s. Survival numbers dramatically improved to 70% at 5-years. Little has changed since this striking improvement 35 years ago. Doses have been tweaked, some different chemotherapy combinations have made subtle improvements but in essence the prognosis has not budged in a very, very long time. Some of this is the struggle of the rare diseases. How much work is being done in the field? Funding is limited and it is not exactly a national health crisis when so few people are affected. For those individuals and their families fighting Osteosarcoma it is a crisis.
So I got to wondering how much comes out in the medical literature per year. I went to PubMed, a common search engine for peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts. I searched Osteosarcoma, and WOW, too many articles. A bit surprising. So I narrowed the search to articles published in 2015. That still left 592 articles in the literature. The screenshot of the search is below…
The articles focus on basic science, clinical trials, new treatment ideas, imaging, staging, surgery, etc…
So why no changes in prognosis? It is puzzling. What can we do better or different? How many researchers will it take? Should we advocate for more collaborative work?
