Long-term survival in patients with Ewing's sarcoma relapsing after completing therapy

While the proportion of patients with Ewing's sarcoma attaining and maintaining long-term remission has markedly improved, a proportion of patients suffer relapse of the tumor. In our experience relapses may occur late in the course of the disease, approximately 20% of those at risk beyond 5 years having recurrence of tumor. Review of our data indicates that for patients relapsing after therapy has been discontinued, the probability of attaining second remission is high (0.84) and that a significant proportion of these patients attaining second complete remission will survive their disease (0.60).