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Abstract
Of eighty-eight patients with embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma of the head and neck, forty-eight
were female and forty were male patients. Ages ranged from two weeks to seventy-seven
years. Sixty-three were children (average age: 6.8 years) and twenty-five were adults
(average age: 37.6 years). In nearly 60 per cent of patients the tumor occurred in
the orbit, nasopharynx, or nose. The presenting complaint was usually that of a rapidly
enlarging, asymptomatic mass. Half the patients had had evidence of the tumor for
three months or less and only six had had it for more than a year on admission.
Seventy-eight per cent of patients are known to have died as a result of the tumor,
49 per cent within the first year, 20 per cent in the second year, and 9 per cent
within three to five years after admission. Eight patients (nine per cent) are known
to be alive and free of disease twenty-one months to twenty years after admission,
one patient (1 per cent) is alive with tumor metastasis, and ten (11 per cent) have
been lost to follow-up study. Of the eight surviving patients assumed to be free of
disease, one was treated by surgery alone, five by combined surgery and radiation,
and two by radiation only.
Histologically, the tumor often presents a varied pattern that in part may be readily
confused with many quite dissimilar neoplasms, among which are reticulum cell sarcoma,
neuroblastoma, myxoma, and amelanotic melanoma. An error in tissue diagnosis may be
minimized by securing adequate and representative tissue for biopsy and by awareness
of a chance encounter with such a lesion.
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References
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© 1965 Published by Elsevier Inc.
