OBJECTIVE: To present the epidemiological profile of patients with symptomatic metastatic spinal disease treated in tertiary public care in the ABC region. METHOD: We evaluated 55 patients with vertebral metastases and collected data on age at diagnosis of metastatic lesion, sex, tumor type, spinal topography and symptoms from January 2008 to January 2011. Disease progression was observed on the following occasions: biopsy of the primary tumor, early spinal symptoms, diagnosis of spinal metastatic disease (images), and date of surgery. RESULTS: The patients' ages ranged from 28 to 85 years; 40% were men and 60% were women. The primary tumors were breast carcinoma (32.7%), multiple myeloma (25.4%), and prostate carcinoma (14.5%). We observed 25 patients (45.4%) with lesions in the thoracic spine, 13 patients (23.6%) with lumbar or sacral lesions, 11 patients (20%) with diffuse lesions, and 6 patients (10.9%) with cervical lesion. Thirty four patients (61.8%) had only pain, and the others (38.2%) had also neurological changes. The median intervals between the primary lesion and the clinical manifestation of vertebral lesion was 190 days; between the spine symptoms and the imaging diagnosis the median was 70 days; for those who underwent surgery, the median between the diagnosis and the procedure was 288 days. CONCLUSION: The epidemiological data were consistent with the literature: female predominance (60%), mean age was 55 years; thoracolumbar metastases were predominantly (69%) due to breast cancer, multiple myeloma and prostate cancer (72%). We observed wide variation in the interval between the chronological description of clinical events, both diagnostic and surgical.
Spine; Neoplasm metastasis; Spinal cord neoplasms; Quality of life; Decompression
