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Dr. Templeton shares the symptoms associated with bone cancer.
Dr. Templeton:
The most common symptoms of bone cancer, actually the primary symptom is pain. Soft tissue cancers are ones that grow in the muscles or the other tissues next to the bone. Those usually don’t hurt unless they start eroding into the bone, but bone cancers typically hurt. Typically, because they are active, they start destroying areas of bone.
Bone is a living structure; it responds to normal day-to-day activities. It tries to respond by making the bone stronger so you can do normal day-to-day activities. When you have a cancer that goes into the bone, it starts chewing up small areas of bone, and so the bone can become weaker and areas of that bone will start to break down. If you would look at this under a microscope, you would actually see little areas of bone that are broken.
Eventually, that can actually turn into a fracture or broken bone that you can see on an x-ray, but before that, because of the small areas of bone that are breaking down, the bone will hurt.
About Dr. Kim Templeton, M.D.:
Kim Templeton, M.D., received her degree from the University of Missouri School of Medicine with a specialty in orthopedics and musculoskeletal oncology and began her career with an orthopedic residency at Chicago's Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center.
She then accepted a Musculoskeletal Oncology Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1995, she came to the KU School of Medicine, where her commitment to excellence and orthopedic education has opened the way to positions of leadership. She is now the Director of the Orthopedic Residency Education Program at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, holds the first Joy McCann Professorship for Women in Medicine and Science, and currently serves as president of the KU Medical Center's Women in Medicine and Science program.
Visit Dr. Templeton at The University of Kansas Hospital