Abstract
Background
The clinical characteristics and prognostic factors of axial chondroblastoma (ACB) are still poorly understood.
Purpose
To characterize clinicopathological characteristics in a large ACB cohort and investigate their correlation with survival. We also sought to compare these results with extra-axial CB (EACB).
Methods
Our institution's local database was retrospectively reviewed and included a total of 132 CB patients, including 61 ACB patients and 71 EACB patients. Immunohistochemistry was used to assess the expression levels of Vimentin (Vim), S100, and cytokeratin (CK) on tumor cells in 132 tissue specimens.
Results
Overall, ACB and EACB had similar characteristics, except for older age and tumor size, as well as higher Vim expression, incidence of surrounding tissue invasion and postoperative sensory or motor dysfunction. Whereas wide resection and absence of invasion of surrounding tissues were consistently associated with favorable survival in the ACB and EACB cohorts in univariate analysis, most parameters showed differential prognostic significance between the 2 groups. Significant prognostic factors for local recurrence-free survival in multivariate analysis included the type of resection and chicken-wire calcification in the ACB cohort. Multivariate analysis of overall survival demonstrated that the type of resection was a significant predictor in the ACB cohort, whereas the type of resection and postoperative sensory or motor dysfunction were predictive of overall survival in the EACB group.
Conclusion
These data suggest that there may be distinct biological behaviors between ACB and EACB and may provide useful information to better understand the prognostic characteristics of patients with ACB and to improve outcome prediction in patients with ACB.