Ablation for Bone Metastases

Bone is the third most common site of metastatic disease after lungs and liver. Bone metastases is the major cause of morbidity in patients with cancer in the form of pain, pathologic fractures, and metabolic effects, limiting patients’ quality of life, mobility, and prognosis. The approach to patients with bone metastases should be multidisciplinary. Radiation therapy is the gold standard palliative treatment for patients with metastatic disease. If RT fails to alleviate the pain and conservative treatment is not sufficient to provide adequate pain relief, minimally invasive interventional techniques should be considered. Image-guided thermal ablation of painful metastases is an effective local treatment for patients with painful metastatic disease and can be combined with cementoplasty and screw fixation when mechanical stability is needed. This treatment offers clinically significant reduction of pain, an improvement in their quality of life, and reduction in the use of analgesic medications by these patients.