Surgical Margins for Excision of Dermatofibrosarcoma Protuberans

ABSTRACT

Dematofibrosarcoma protuberans(DFSP) is a moderate-degree malignant tumor with high recurrence rate and low metastasis rate, from soft tissue. Principle of treatment is wide excision or Mohs micrographic surgery(MMS). Although wide excision has been performed with surgical margins of 2-5cm until nowadays, there are problems of preservation of surrounding normal tissue. Therefore the authors tried to identify desirable surgical margins and operative method. From January 1999 to April 2003, 12 patients with DFSP were operated. We applied different surgical margins and operative methods according to the location of lesions. On the face, we performed MMS with surgical margin of 3-4 mm in 2 cases although there are problems of operation time and expense. But on the extremities and trunk, we performed authors' method to begin excising with surgical margins of 1cm and excise extensively with MMS by 1cm in 4 cases after April, 2001 although we had performed wide excision with surgical margin of 3 cm in 6 cases before. There was no recurrence or metastasis in the follow-up period. So we think that author's method is effective in surgical excision of DFSP