Soft tissue sarcomas are a group of cancers which develop from a number of different supportive tissues in the body including fibrous tissue, muscle, ligaments, tendons and fat.

Soft tissue sarcomas are rare. They make up less than 1% of all cancers, with only about 1200 new cases being diagnosed each year in the United Kingdom. Relatively speaking, they are actually more common in children than adults, making up about 8% of all cancers in those under the age of 15.

The majority of soft tissue sarcomas develop in the limbs and they are three times commoner in the legs than the arms.

The treatment of soft tissue sarcomas is influenced by whether the tumours are low or high grade when they are looked at under the microscope and on their size. Tumours less than 5 cms in diameter are easier to treat and have better results than larger tumours.

The low grade sarcomas can often be treated with an operation alone and then kept under close observation. The higher grade sarcomas have a strong tendency to spread into the surrounding tissues. This spread is often made up of microscopic threads of tumour cells, which are invisible to the naked eye. This means that it is often difficult for surgeons to be sure that the growth has been completely removed when an operation is performed. For this reason, in the past, it was usually recommended that an amputation of all or part of the affected limb was the safest way to treat these cancers.

In the last twenty years, however, there has been a change in approach. This has involved using surgery to take away the growth with a wide margin of apparently normal tissue (which may still involve quite a big operation depending on the size and position of the sarcoma). This is then followed by a course of radiotherapy treatment covering the operation site and the surrounding are

This combination of surgery and radiotherapy means that only about one in twenty people with a soft tissue sarcoma of a limb now needs to have an amputation. Sometimes a sarcoma is too large or stuck down to make an operation possible, but the surgeon feels that it might become operable if it could be reduced in size. In this situation the doctors may recommend a course of radiotherapy or chemotherapy before the operation in the hope that it may shrink the sarcoma and make it more operable.

The results of treatment with surgery and radiotherapy, and occasionally chemotherapy appear to be every bit as good as the previous more drastic operations, with the majority of people being cured as a result