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Pediatric rhabdomyosarcomas in Tunisia.

INTRODUCTION
Rhabdomyosarcoma is the most common soft tissue sarcoma in the first two decades of life. Since there is a paucity of reports on the pattern of its occurrence in Tunisia, we here analysed the epidemiological pattern, clinical features, and pathology.


DESIGN
We retrospectively studied 30 consecutive cases of histologically proven rhabdomyosarcoma in children aged 0-15 years extracted from the database of the Cancer Registry of the Center of Tunisia for the period 1993-2007.


RESULTS
Rhabdomyosarcomas represented 53.6% of soft tissue sarcomas and 3.8% of all children cancer cases registered during this period. The male/female ratio was 2.7 with a mean age at diagnosis of 5.9 years. The embryonal subtype was the most frequent (60%) and the two most common sites of disease were the head and neck (50%) and genito-urinary tract(23.3%). Chemotherapy was used in 90% of patients; 43.3% of patients had radical surgery and 26.7% of patients received radiation therapy.


CONCLUSION
The epidemiology, pathology and clinical features of rhabdomyosarcoma in Tunisian children are close to those reported from other countries.