Abstract

Background: Soft tissue tumors are a complex group of neoplasms with differentiation towards mesenchymal tissue occurring in all age groups. Although pathologically diverse, they frequently exhibit similar clinical presentations and radiological features. Therefore, correct histopathologic diagnosis is crucial. Despite histopathologic diagnosis is widely practiced in study area very few studies were found on histopathologic pattern of soft tissue sarcoma. Therefore, this study was aimed to describe histopathology pattern of soft tissue tumors in Jimma University Medical Center, 2018.

Materials and methods: A cross sectional study design was employed on five years patient’s biopsy record of Jimma University Medical Center pathology department from September 2013 to August 2018 G.C. Structured check lists was used to collect data. Data were entered into Epi data v.3.1 and exported to SPSS V.20 for analyses. Data was described using frequency, proportions and median. Finally result was presented using tables, figures and narrative form.

Results: A total of 268 patients were diagnosed with soft tissue tumor over the last five years with malignant to benign ratio of 1:2.6 and sex ratio of Male to Female 1:1.01. The age group at which soft tissue tumors commonly occur was from 21-30 (26.9%) years of age. The most favored site of occurrence (59.5%) is the lower limb. From the different histologic subtypes of sarcoma, the top three are Malignant Fibrous Histiocytoma (27.0%), which is common in adults followed by Fibrosarcoma (18.9%), and Rhabdomyosarcoma (17.6%) which is common in youngsters.

Conclusion: Benign tumors are three times more common than malignant. The most common soft tissue sarcoma in children is Rhabdomyosarcoma and in adults Malignant Fibrous Histiocytoma and larger scale study needs to be planned to look at more aspects that could possibly contribute to the causes of soft tissue tumors.

Keywords: Histopathology; Patterns; Soft tissue tumor; Sarcoma; Ethiopia