Bone Metastasis and Pathological Fractures

Abstract

Bone metastasis commonly occurs in association with solid malignant tumors such as breast, prostate, lung, and renal cancers (1–5). Thirty to seventy percent of cancer patients have skeletal metastasis (6), making the axial skeleton the third most common site for metastasis after lung and liver. Because all of these cancers (breast, prostate, lung, and renal) are common, metastatic bone lesions actually outnumber primary bone malignancies. The spine is affected in approximately half of all patients with bone metastasis (5,6), and involvement of the appendicular skeleton, primarily the femur and humerus, is also common. Metastatic bone lesions can be classified as osteolytic, osteoblastic, mixed, or intertrabecular type based on histology (3,4,7). Bone metastases secondary to breast cancer are typically osteolytic in nature, and these lesions are of particular interest as bone resorption at these sites often leads to pathological fracture. Thus, breast cancer is also the most common cause of pathological fracture (7).KeywordsBone MetastasisTissue EngineeringBone Morphogenetic ProteinPathological FractureBone Tissue EngineeringThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.