Chemotherapy for bone cancer

Chemotherapy uses anti-cancer (cytotoxic) drugs to destroy cancer cells.

Chemotherapy is an important part of treatment for most people with:

• osteosarcoma
• Ewing sarcoma
• spindle cell sarcoma.

It is not used often for other types of primary bone cancer.

Chemotherapy may be given:

• before you have surgery or radiotherapy
• after surgery or radiotherapy
• if the cancer comes back after treatment.

If you have osteosarcoma or Ewing sarcoma, you usually have chemotherapy before and after surgery.

Before having chemotherapy, you have tests to check your general health. It takes a few days to get the results. Your cancer doctor will talk with you about this.

Primary bone cancer might be treated with a combination of chemotherapy drugs.

Osteosarcoma is usually treated with:

• MAP – methotrexate, doxorubicin and cisplatin
• AP – doxorubicin and cisplatin.

Children, teenagers and young adults (aged 30 or under) with osteosarcoma may be given a targeted therapy drug with the chemotherapy.

Ewing sarcoma is often treated with:

• VDC/IE – vincristine, doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide, alternating with ifosfamide and etoposide.
• We have more information about individual chemotherapy drugs.

We want everyone affected by cancer to feel our information is written for them.

We want our information to be as clear as possible. To do this, we try to:

• use plain English
• explain medical words
• use short sentences
• use illustrations to explain text
• structure the information clearly
• make sure important points are clear.

We use gender-inclusive language and talk to our readers as ‘you’ so that everyone feels included. Where clinically necessary we use the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’ or ‘male’ and ‘female’. For example, we do so when talking about parts of the body or mentioning statistics or research about who is affected.

You can read more about how we produce our information here.