Last updated: 11/24/2009

Limb salvage surgery is performed to remove cancer and avoid amputation, while preserving the patient's appearance and the greatest possible degree of function in the affected limb. The procedure is most commonly performed for bone tumors and bone...

sarcomas, but is also performed for soft tissue sarcomas affecting the extremities. This complex alternative to amputation is used to cure cancers that are slow to spread from the limb where they originate to other parts of the body, or that have not yet invaded soft tissue.

Twenty years ago, the standard of care for a patient with a cancer in a limb was to amputate the affected extremity. Limb salvage surgery was an exception to the rule. Today, it is the exception that a patient loses a limb as part of cancer treatment. This is due to improvements in surgical technique, both resection and reconstruction, imaging methods (computed tomography [CT scan] and magnetic resonance imaging [MRI]), and survival rates of patients treated with chemotherapy.

In recent years, limb salvage has been extended more and more to patients severely affected by chronic degenerative bone and joint diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, or those facing diabetic limb amputation or acute and chronic limb wounds.