Immediate and Short-term Outcomes of Imaging Guided Percutaneous Cementoplasty for Pelvic Bone Metastases

Bone metastasis (BM) is the major cause of morbidity in patients with cancer. After lungs and liver, bone is the third most common site of metastatic disease. Prostate and breast cancers are responsible for the majority of bone metastases (up to 70%), followed by thyroid, lung, urinary bladder, and renal cancers, and finally melanoma. The incidence of bone metastasis is approximately 100,000 new cases per year in the united states and is increasing. Bone metastasis could result in skeletal-related events, including pain, pathological fracture, hypercalcemia, and nerve and visceral compression, which seriously affect the quality of life (QoL) of cancer patients. Bone metastases can be classified as osteolytic (osteoclast-mediated bone resorption), osteoblastic (osteoblast-mediated bone deposition), or mixed.

Fifty percent of the pain symptoms experienced by patients with cancer originate from BM. Tumor extension to neural structures, can cause a pain that may be radicular (exacerbated by percussion or palpation) and/or mechanical (exacerbated by movement). In advanced cases, pain can become intolerable and refractory to conventional therapies, resulting in walking disability, psychological and functional impact, and significant worsening of the QoL.

The effectiveness of surgery for bone metastasis in advanced cancer patients is limited to improvement of patients' quality of life. In most of these patients, complete resection or extended curettage of the bone metastasis with major reconstruction is often not feasible due to their poor general condition and accompanying other metastases. For some types of these bone metastases, surgical resection can lead to the stripping of the surrounding soft tissue and muscle attachment and addressing bone defects, causing more intraoperative bleeding, prolonged healing time, and increase the risk of wound complications, which in turn result in a longer recovery time for patients who usually have a limited life expectancy. Therefore, less invasive procedures, including percutaneous ablation (microwave ablation, radiofrequency ablation, cryoablation, and high-energy ultrasound) and/or bone cement [polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA)] injection, have become possible options. This is especially true for pelvic metastatic lesions because the surgery is particularly burdensome.

In addition, life expectancy of patients with metastatic bone disease is the most important factor in the decision making for surgical and/or medical treatment. A short life expectancy is in favor of the use of less invasive procedures, that have lower complication rates and shorter rehabilitation times. In these situations, interventional radiology procedures play an important either primary or complementary role in the management of bone metastases, especially in terms of palliation of pain, improvement of ambulation problems and treatment of fractures. This is because short life expectancies, more often, require palliative rather than curative regimens and make rapid pain relief to become a priority.

Aim of the study This study aimed to summarize the immediate operative and short-term efficacy and safety outcomes of percutaneous cementoplasty for pelvic metastases.