[Strategy of therapy for bone metastases of cancer]

Recently, the importance of cancer-induced bone disease has been recognized. Bone metastases of cancer usually do not have major impacts on prognosis of patients, but skeletal-related events (SRE) markedly aggravate QOL of patients. For bone metastases, multi-disciplinary approaches including drug therapy, orthopedic therapy, radiation therapy, or intervention therapy are necessary. As drug therapy, bone-specific drugs that inhibit osteoclasts such as bisphosphonates, anti-RANKL antibody denosumab have been developed and have shown to decrease SRE and improve QOL. Further development of new bone-specific drugs is ongoing.