Why the study?
Resection and reconstruction are challenging in bulky head and neck low-grade myofibroblastic sarcomas.
Wide excision with plastic reconstruction and adjuvant radiotherapy successfully treated a recurrent giant myofibroblastic sarcoma of the neck in a 15-year-old girl.
Supports multimodality therapy for rare recurrent pediatric neck sarcoma; leaves open need for larger series before broader adoption.
Sarcomas are rare tumors arising from a variety of mesenchymal tissues which are even rarer in head and neck region amounting 1% only of the 5% of sarcomas. About 80% of head and neck sarcomas originate in soft tissue while the remaining 20% arise from bone (Cormier and Pollock in J Clin 54:94-109, 2004). One among the commonly presenting variants of sarcomas in head and neck that our patient was diagnosed with is Low grade myofibroblastic sarcoma (LGMS). These even though uncommon have a predilection for head and neck region particularly the tongue (Mentzel et al. in Am J Surg Pathol 22:1228-38, 1998; Cai et al. in Virchows Arch 463:827-36, 2013; Meng et al. in Chin Med J 120:363-9, 2007; Demarosi et al. in Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol Oral Radiol Endod. 108:248-54, 2009). LGMS was reclassified as a distinct entity by the WHO classification of soft tissue tumors in 2002 (Qiu et al. in Oncol Lett 9:619-25, 2015). Oncological resection is the mainstay of treatment. In case of bulky tumor, resection and reconstruction would be challenging. We report a recurrent LGMS of 15-year-old girl who presented with a ginormous soft tissue swelling in her left neck region which made her day-to-day activities strenuous and made her non ambulatory and the line of treatment executed in order to get her back on feet, healthy & free of the debilitating tumor.
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Dinker et al. (2023) studied this question.
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