Optimal treatment strategy for paratesticular liposarcoma: retrospective analysis of 265 reported cases

Liposarcoma is one of the most common subtypes of soft tissue sarcoma. Although the standard treatment for localized liposarcoma is surgical resection with negative margins, a treatment specific to paratesticular liposarcoma has yet to be quantitatively evaluated.

A systematic search of Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and Google was performed to find articles describing localized paratesticular liposarcoma published between 1979 and 2018 in English. The final cohort included 265 patients in 183 articles. The starting point was the time of surgical treatment, and the endpoint was the time of recurrence, including local recurrence, or distant metastasis.

The median patient age was 62 years and the median tumor size was 9.5 cm. In total, 178 patients underwent high inguinal orchiectomy and 40 underwent simple tumorectomy. Based on the Kaplan-Meier curves, recurrence-free survival rates were significantly higher for those who underwent high inguinal orchiectomy than for those who underwent tumorectomy. Moreover, those with microscopic positive margins had a higher risk of recurrence than those with negative margins, but adjuvant radiation therapy after resection had no statistically significant effect on recurrence-free survival, even in subgroup analysis of patients with positive margins. Regarding the pathological subtypes, dedifferentiated, pleomorphic, and round-cell liposarcoma had a higher risk of recurrence than well-differentiated or myxoid liposarcoma. In the multivariate analysis, high inguinal orchiectomy greatly affected recurrence-free survival. The tumor size and histological subtype were independent risk factors for recurrence.

Complete resection with high inguinal orchiectomy is the optimal treatment for paratesticular liposarcoma.