Results and perspectives of the treatment of skeletal neoplasms.

Improvements in the therapy of skeletal neoplasms at the end of the 20th century are the reason for a retrospective view on the development of the therapy of skeletal neoplasms, especially in the Slovak Republic. Up to the sixties years of the 20th century was amputation the imperative in the surgical treatment of malignant tumors, above all tumors of the extremities. Then chemotherapy was introduced into the treatment of these tumors, in Slovak Republic it was later. Bone transplantations were widely used in the 70 and 80 years of 20th century. Autotransplantations of bone grafts were used at the Orthopaedic department in Bratislava already in the year 1953, but low number of appropriate grafts limited their use in clinical practice. In the 70 and 80 years development of bone banks was observed. Results of the treatment of malignant diseases with this technique are considered poor. Only few patients survived more than 5 years after the surgery, mainly due to inappropriate techniques of detection, localization and determination of the size of the tumor. Biopsy played above all at this time an important role in the diagnostics of bone tumors. Apart from basic examinations of the fixed material, processed after it was imbedded in particular medium, perioperative biopsy is recently being performed with the technique of frozen sections from unfixed tissue obtained during the surgery. This type of material processing prolongs the period from obtaining the material till making the diagnosis, but the advantages of this type of examination are undoubted. (Ref. 17.).