Introduction: The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of revision surgery, after unplanned excision, on oncological outcome and surgical morbidity in soft tissue sarcomas and also to assess the relation between margin status and oncologic outcome.
Materials and methods: We undertook a retrospective analysis of prospectively maintained database of 153 patients with peripheral soft tissue sarcomas treated in our institute from 2006-2010.
Results: Postoperatively, 111(72.5%) patients had negative margins, 20(13.1%) had close margins and 22(14.4%) had planned positive margins. Local recurrence rate was 19.8% in patients with negative margins and 28.6% for patients with close or positive margins (p= 0.007). There was no statistically significant difference in rates of distant metastases (18.9% vs 21.4%, p value 0.56) and five-year overall survival (82.5% Vs 79.8%, p value 0.41) between margin negative and close/positive groups. The five-year overall survival rates were 80.4 vs 77.8% (p =0.42) and five-year disease-free survival rates were 72.4% vs 70.2% (p=0.3), in the revision surgery group and primary surgery group respectively.
Conclusion: Margin status after excision of soft tissue sarcoma is not a direct predictor for overall survival or distant metastasis. Revision surgery after an unplanned excision does not carry worse survival compared to primary surgery group.
Keywords: margins of excision recurrence.; reoperation; sarcoma.