Pelvic Ewing sarcoma: Should all patients receive pre-operative radiotherapy, or should it be delivered selectively?

Locally recurrent disease following surgical resection of Ewing sarcoma (ES) confers a poor prognosis. Limited evidence is available evaluating non-selective use of pre-operative radiotherapy (RT) for patients with pelvic ES and its effect on local control and survival.

49 consecutive patients with pelvic ES were identified retrospectively from a prospectively collated database. Patients either received non-selective pre-operative RT and surgery (n = 27), or selective post-operative RT (n = 22) (surgery alone (n = 11) or surgery and post-operative RT (n = 11)).

Patients who had non-selective pre-operative radiotherapy appeared to have a higher LRFS, 88.0% compared to 66.5% in the selective RT group (p = 0.096, Kaplan Meier; p = 0.028, Chi-squared). Administration of non-selective, pre-operative RT to all patients with pelvic ES elevates the LFRS to that of the good responder group (≥90% tumour necrosis and margins, p = 0.880). There was no difference in metastasis-free survival, 60.0% and 54.5% (p = 0.728) and overall survival (OS), 57.7% and 63.6% (p = 0.893). The majority of pre-operative RT patients had both good necrosis (≥90%) (p = 0.003) and widely excised tumours, 81.5% vs 59.1% (p = 0.080). Tumour volume ≥250 ml was associated with worse LRFS (p = 0.045) and post-operative complications (p = 0.017). There may be improved LRFS (p = 0.057) with pre-operative proton-beam RT compared to surgery and selective post-operative RT.

Pre-operative photon or proton-beam RT to all pelvic ES may improve LRFS compared to the selective delivery of post-operative RT. Radiotherapy delivered to all patients results in a greater percentage of highly necrotic tumours at surgical excision, enabling a greater proportion of patients with wide resection margins.