Soft tissue sarcoma of the head and neck region in adults

Soft tissue sarcomas (STS) are rare solid tumours accounting for less than 1% of all malignancies and are very unusual in the head and neck region. Histopathologically diagnosed cases of STS treated at Regional Cancer Centre (RCC). Trivandrum, India, between January 1989 and November 2000 were analyzed retrospectively. Survival analysis was carried out by Kaplan-Meier method and curves were compared using log rank test. A total of 22 cases were seen during the study period. The mean age of the patients was 36.4 years with male-to-female ratio of 2:1. The neck, lower jaw, tongue, cheek, scalp and maxilla were the commonest sites affected. None of the patients had palpable neck nodes or distant metastasis at presentation. All the patients were treated with primary surgical resection and this was followed by adjuvant treatment in 14 cases (63.6%). After a median follow-up of 14.5 months, two patients died, six developed local recurrence, four developed metastatic disease and another patient developed second primary sarcoma. The overall 5-year survival was 80% while the 5-year disease-free survival rate was 24.1%. The majority of the patients failed within first and second year. None of the parameters except grade of tumour (P=0.008) were found to have a significant effect on survival. The overall survival rate for patients with soft tissue sarcoma of the head and neck is good, however, disease-free survival is poor as the majority of these fail within 2 years of completing treatment.