[Post-surgery medical rehabilitation of patients with malignant bone tumors]

Bone tumors are relatively rare tumors. The incidence of malignant bone tumors is 8.7 per million. The most frequent and also the most dangerous are osteosarcomas and Ewing's sarcoma.

which usually affect young people under the age of twenty. These tumors are treated with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy and surgery. Modern surgical pracitce in treatment of bone tumors relies on sparing the affected extremity. Lower limb amputation for bone cancer patients used to be the most frequent surgical procedure, but today it is being done only in the minority of cases. Amputations were performed to prevent local spreading of the tumor, as well as secondary deposits. With major advance of chemotherapy and surgical techniques in order to spare the extremity, therapeutical significance of amputation has decreased, although their number is still high.

In cases where amputation has been suggested as an option, the patient must be informed about all the aspects of prosthetic rehabilitation, from those directly concerning the psychophysical integrity up to technical and functional possibilities of prosthetic rehabilitation. Saving the patient's life is, of course, the first priority, but it must be followed by social reintegration and return to work.

If we analyze the length of rehabilitation, we can conclude that patients with cemented modular oncological endoprostheses recover faster than patients undergoing other techniques as well as amputees. However, the level of patient's functional performance is different. Sometimes, higher functional impairment and sparing the extremity, at the end of the rehabilitation is associated with a lower degree of functional capacity and esthetically a less appealing walk than it is the case with patients undergoing amputation, provided with modern prostheses.