The National Cancer Institute (NCI)provides the PDQ pediatric cancer treatment information summaries as a public service to increase the availability of evidence-based cancer information to health professionals, patients, and the public.

Cancer in children and adolescents is rare. Children and adolescents with cancer should be referred to medical centers that have a multidisciplinary team of cancer specialists with experience treating the cancers that occur during childhood and adolescence. This multidisciplinary team approach incorporates the skills of the primary care physician, pediatric surgical subspecialists, radiation oncologist, pediatric oncologist/hematologist, rehabilitation specialists, pediatric nurse specialists, social workers, and others to ensure that children receive treatment, supportive care, and rehabilitation that will achieve optimal survival and quality of life. (Refer to the PDQ Supportive Care summaries for specific information about supportive care for children and adolescents with cancer.)

Guidelines for pediatric cancer centers and their role in the treatment of pediatric patients with cancer have been outlined by the American Academy of Pediatrics.[1] At these pediatric cancer centers, clinical trials are available for most types of cancer that occur in children and adolescents, and the opportunity to participate in these trials is offered to most patients/families. Clinical trials for children and adolescents with cancer are generally designed to compare potentially better therapy with therapy that is currently accepted as standard. Most of the progress made in identifying curative therapies for childhood cancers has been achieved through clinical trials. Information about ongoing clinical trials is available from the NCI Web site.

In recent decades, dramatic improvements in survival have been achieved for children and adolescents with cancer. Childhood and adolescent cancer survivors require close follow-up because cancer therapy side effects may persist or develop months or years after treatment. (Refer to the PDQ Late Effects of Treatment for Childhood Cancer summary for specific information about the incidence, type, and monitoring of late effects in childhood and adolescent cancer survivors.)

Childhood rhabdomyosarcoma, a soft tissue malignant tumor of skeletal muscle origin, accounts for approximately 3.5% of the cases of cancer among children aged 0 to 14 years and 2% of the cases among adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 19 years.[2,3] It is usually a curable disease in most children with localized disease who receive combined modality therapy, with more than 70% surviving 5 years after diagnosis.[4-6] Relapses are uncommon after 5 years of disease-free survival, with a 9% late-event rate at 10 years. Relapses, however, are more common for patients who have gross residual disease in unfavorable sites following initial surgery and those who have metastatic disease at diagnosis.[7] The most common primary sites for rhabdomyosarcoma are the head and neck (e.g., parameningeal, orbit, pharyngeal), the genitourinary tract, and the extremities.[4,5] Other less common primary sites include the trunk, chest wall, the abdomen (including the retroperitoneum and biliary tract), and the perineal/anal region.

Most cases of rhabdomyosarcoma occur sporadically with no recognized predisposing factor or risk factor,[8] though a small proportion are associated with genetic conditions. These conditions include Li-Fraumeni cancer susceptibility syndrome (with germline p53 mutations),[9-11] neurofibromatosis type I,[12] Costello syndrome (with germline HRAS mutations),[13-15] Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (with which Wilm tumor and hepatoblastoma are more commonly associated),[16,17] and Noonan syndrome.[18]

The prognosis for a child or adolescent with rhabdomyosarcoma is related to the age of the patient, site of origin, resectability, presence of metastases, number of metastatic sites or tissues involved, presence or absence of lymph node involvement, histopathology,[4,5,19-25] and unique biological characteristics of rhabdomyosarcoma tumor cells. Response to induction chemotherapy, as judged by anatomic imaging, does not appear to correlate with the likelihood of survival in patients with rhabdomyosarcoma.[26] Examples of both clinical and biological factors with proven or possible prognostic significance are briefly described below.

• Children younger than 1 year may pose a problem in terms of the ability to deliver aggressive therapy including full-dose radiation and appropriate chemotherapy on schedule; therefore, outcome may be adversely affected.[6,27] Children aged between 1 and 9 years have the best overall survival.[20]



• Primary sites with more favorable prognoses include the orbit and nonparameningeal head and neck, paratestis and vagina (nonbladder, nonprostate genitourinary), and the biliary tract.[4,5,28-30]



• Tumor burden at diagnosis has prognostic significance. Patients with smaller tumors (<5 cm) have improved survival compared with children with larger tumors; children with metastatic disease at diagnosis have the poorest prognosis.[4,28,31] The prognostic significance of metastatic disease is modified by tumor histology (embryonal is more favorable than other histologies) and by the number of metastatic sites.[21] Similarly, patients with metastatic genitourinary (nonbladder, nonprostate) primary tumors have a more favorable outcome compared with patients with metastatic disease and primary tumors at other sites.[32] In addition, patients with otherwise localized disease but with proven regional lymph node involvement have a poorer prognosis than patients without regional nodal involvement.[24,25]



• The extent of disease following the primary surgical procedure (i.e., the clinical group) is also correlated with outcome.[4] In the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study (IRS)-III, patients with gross residual disease after initial surgery (clinical group III) had a 5-year survival rate of approximately 70% compared with a greater than 90% 5-year survival rate for patients with no residual tumor after surgery (clinical group I) and an approximately 80% 5-year survival rate for patients with microscopic residual tumor following surgery (clinical group II).[4,19]



• The alveolar subtype is more prevalent among patients with less favorable clinical features (e.g., younger than 1 year or older than 10 years, extremity primaries, and metastatic disease), and is generally associated with a worse outcome. In the IRS-I and IRS-II studies, the alveolar subtype was associated with a less favorable outcome even in patients whose primary tumor was completely resected (clinical group I).[29] Statistically-significant differences in survival for histopathologic subtype were not, however, noted when all patients with rhabdomyosarcoma were analyzed,[33,34] nor were differences noted by histologic subtype in a large group of German children with rhabdomyosarcoma.[28] In the IRS-III study, outcome for patients with clinical group I alveolar subtype tumors was similar to those of other patients with clinical group I tumors, but the patients with alveolar subtype received more intensive therapy.[4]

Patients with undifferentiated sarcomas were treated in trials coordinated by the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study Group from 1972 until 2006,[35] but are currently eligible for the nonrhabdomyosarcomatous soft tissue sarcoma protocol using agents active in adult soft tissue sarcoma such as ifosfamide and doxorubicin (COG-ARST0332). For more information refer to the PDQ Childhood Soft Tissue Sarcoma summary.

Because treatment and prognosis depend, in part, on the histology and molecular genetics of the tumor, it is necessary that the tumor tissue be reviewed by pathologists with experience in the evaluation and diagnosis of tumors in children. Additionally, the diversity of primary sites, the distinctive surgical and radiation therapy treatments for each primary site, and the subsequent site-specific rehabilitation underscore the importance of treating children with rhabdomyosarcoma in medical centers with appropriate experience in all therapeutic modalities.

References

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