Epidemiology of bone and soft tissue sarcomas

Bone and soft tissue sarcomas collectively make up 12% of all pediatric malignancies. While there have been significant improvements in treatment for these sarcomas, mortality and morbidity are still high. There is also a substantial heterogeneity in the etiologies and biology of bone and soft tissue sarcomas, making these malignancies difficult to study from an epidemiologic perspective. Our understanding of risk factors for the development of these sarcomas remains limited to a few environmental exposures and well-described hereditary cancer predisposition syndromes. However, these factors are not consistent across all bone and soft tissue sarcomas. In this chapter, we review the epidemiology of bone and soft tissue sarcomas, including a discussion of the roles of environmental risk factors, established predisposing syndromes, and other suspected risk factors.