Dedifferentiated chondrosarcoma: radiographic features.

Abstract

Dedifferentiated chondrosarcomas, unlike ordinary chondrosarcomas, are highly aggressive tumors that frequently metastasize. The lesion is characterized by a lytic intraosseous or extraosseous soft-tissue mass that is devoid of the calcifications that are usually associated with a chondroid tumor. We describe the radiographic and pathologic features of five cases involving dedifferentiated chondrosarcoma.

Dedifferentiated central chondrosarcoma

“…10 However, in our series, just Ͼ50% of lesions had the radiographic aspect of a dedifferentiated chondrosarcoma. This finding is consistent with previous reports.…”

“…3,4 Although there are numerous single patients and small series of patients with dedifferentiated chondrosarcomas reported in the literature, [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] only a very few large series have been published. 3,4,13,14 Therefore, many uncertainties remain about prognostic factors for patients with this lesion.…”

Dedifferentiated chondrosarcoma?a fatal disease

“…This group was first described by Dahlin and Beabout [11]. It includes 1%-2% of all primary bone tumours [22]. From the time of diagnosis the mean survival period is approximately 2 years.…”

“…Histologically, DDCS consists of two distinguishable components: the chondroid component and the dedifferentiated component. The chondroid component can be an enchondroma or chondrosarcoma (CS) of any grade [9,11,22,23,24,25,26,30,32,33]. Mercuri et al [25] reported a rather high proportion of enchondromas (10/74) coexisting with the dedifferentiated component.…”

“…The prognosis is determined by the non-chondromatous part of the tumour [3,10,14]. These components can be classified as malignant fibrous-histiocytomas (MFHs), osteogenic sarcomas, angiosarcomas, fibrosarcomas, rhabdomyosarcomas, leiomyo-sarcomas, giant cell tumours or even undifferentiated sarcomas of different grades of malignancy [4,10,13,22,31].…”