Bone cement implantation combined with radiation therapy for vertebral metastases

  Metastases are the most common among vertebral tumors, and more than 80% of them undergo osteolytic destruction, which can lead to reduced stability and weight-bearing capacity of the spine, vertebral fracture, kyphosis, and even paraplegia; the pain is severe, which makes patients suffer and seriously affects their quality of life.  Traditional treatment methods include medication, radiotherapy and surgery. The efficacy of medication for pain relief is not long-lasting and the improvement of symptoms is limited; conventional radiation therapy is slow to work and is prone to side effects such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, decreased white blood cells and even increased pain and normal tissue damage after the initial radiation therapy; stereotactic conformal radiation therapy has better efficacy and less damage to normal tissues, but it cannot enhance the stability of the spine and achieve better treatment results; surgery can achieve the purpose of strengthening the stability of the spine and decompression. Surgery can achieve the purpose of strengthening spinal stability and decompression, and the pain relief rate can reach 90%, but its trauma, complications, narrow indications, and long postoperative recovery time.  In recent years, a minimally invasive treatment technique, cement implantation, has been widely used in clinical practice to improve the treatment status of vertebral metastases. Bone cement implantation is performed by percutaneously puncturing the vertebral body under fluoroscopic surveillance and injecting bone cement into the lesion so that it can adequately fill the area of lesion destruction, thus achieving the treatment purpose. The most commonly used bone cement is Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), which produces heat up to 70°C and burns the tumor tissue for therapeutic effect. Its main effects are: 1. pain relief; 2. strengthening the stability of the vertebral body; 3. inhibiting the progression of local lesions. Only 2~4 hours of bed rest is required after the operation, and 80~95% of patients can have pain relief within 6~72 hours after the operation. The treatment is minimally invasive, with only a localized needle channel incision at the puncture. Because of the obvious pain relief effect of bone cement implantation, and the ability to strengthen the vertebral body, improve its weight-bearing capacity and spinal stability, thus improving the quality of life of patients; its treatment process is less traumatic and has fewer complications, which makes this technique more and more widely used.  The combination of percutaneous puncture bone cement implantation and radiation therapy for vertebral tumors can complement each other: 1, to relieve pain symptoms in a short period of time and prolong the remission period; 2, to restore the compressive strength of the vertebral body to a certain extent, strengthen the stability of the spine, and avoid the occurrence of vertebral compression fractures; 3, to enhance the therapeutic effect on the tumor by combining internal inactivation and external irradiation of the vertebral body.  The combined application of the two technologies, with synergistic superposition of therapeutic effects, improves the treatment status of vertebral tumors, prolongs the remission period and improves the survival quality of patients, and thus has a broad application prospect.