A sarcoma diagnosis can be difficult because a sarcoma can originate virtually any place in the body and there is no standard set of presenting symptoms in patents. Sarcoma type, staging, metastasis (i.e. whether it has spread beyond its primary or initial site) and treatment all play a role in determining the ultimate outcome to the patient. Because sarcomas are rare and there are so many different forms of the disease, there is often insufficient data (or numbers of cases) to provide an accurate estimate of a patient’s prognosis or chance of survival. For this reason, a review of the statistics that can be found online or in medical journals may be disheartening. If you chose to review these statistics, you should do so cautiously. Each patient may react to the disease or its treatment differently, so no journal or statistic can predict a patient’s chance of survival. In fact, many sarcoma survivors have defied all odds, overcoming what at one point in time seemed to be an impossible challenge. If you or a loved-one has been diagnosed with sarcoma, please seek a specialist who sees a large number of sarcoma patients each month. Consider visiting a National Cancer Institute Cancer Center or a surgeon from the Musculoskeletal Tumor Society.
This website provides a great many resoruces for additioanl sarcoma research as well as RSS feeds for the very latest in sarcoma studies, reseacrh and information. Additional sarcoma information can also be found at the University of Minnesota Sarcoma Information Center. Funding for the sarcoma section of the U of M website is provided by the KWRISF.
We hope that the information contained in this website will be helpful to you in better understanding your (or your loved one’s) sarcoma and in discussing it with members of your support group. You can also order a printed version of the RIS Sarcoma Patient Starter Notebook which contains the much of same information in a notebbok form that you will find on this website.