Malignant bone tumors

This review will focus on the updates published or presented over the past year in the field of musculoskeletal oncology. Be-cause of the rarity of musculoskeletal tumors, much of the pub-lished research in any given year is primarily composed of retrospective or nonrandomized studies. Large prospective clin-ical studies are usually performed in multi-institutional fashion or by orthopaedic groups at major cancer centers. Musculoskel-etal oncology is one orthopaedic subspecialty, however, in which there are frequent molecular discoveries related to bone and soft-tissue sarcomas or metastatic bone disease. The update will be divided into sections addressing the advances in the diagnosis and treatment of malignant bone tumors, malignant soft-tissue tumors, benign bone and soft-tissue tumors, and metastatic disease. There will also be a sec-tion in which updates on limb-salvage options and outcomes are discussed. In addition, the upcoming tumor-related meet-ings and web sites will be listed along with a list of current ref-erences. Finally, the editorial staff of The Journal reviewed recently published articles in over 100 medical journals to identify high-quality research articles that received a Level of Evidence grade of I. Three level-I articles were identified that are relevant to musculoskeletal oncology, and these references are listed after the standard bibliography. A brief annotated re-view is provided for each of these articles