Giant-Cell Tumors of Bone in South India

¹ Departments of Orthopaedics and Pathology, Christian Medical College, Vellore

Thirty-three patients with giant-cell tumors of bone were treated in Christian Medical College Hospital at Vellore, South India, during the ten years from 1950 through 1959. There were eighteen male and fifteen female patients whose ages ranged from twelve to fifty-six years. Twenty patients (61 per cent) were twenty-one to thirty-five years old. Seven (21 per cent) were under twenty-one years of age. Thirteen (39 per cent) of the tumors were classed as Grade I, seventeen (51 per cent) as Grade II, and three (9 per cent) as Grade III. The three Grade III tumors occurred in young patients, thirteen, sixteen, and twenty-six years old. This distribution of histological grades agrees quite closely with that reported by Gupta and Andleigh from a series of twenty-four cases studied in Jaipur, in northern India. Giant-cell tumors were the most frequently encountered primary bone tumor in this general teaching hospital which draws the majority of its patients from the Dravidian peoples of southern India. Since seven of the thirty-three patients in this series were less than twenty-one years old, this study would suggest that giant-cell tumors are more frequently found in the younger-age group in southern India than in some other countries.

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