The following symptoms and complaints may indicate osteoblastoma:
Main symptoms
- Little pain – dull ache; unlike the comparable osteoid osteoma, does not necessarily occur at night; because the vertebrae are often involved, the pain is often localized in the back
- Neurological symptoms such as numbness and paresis (paralysis) – as a sign of compression of the spinal cord; they can manifest themselves in the form of sensory deficits, bladder or rectal dysfunction, up to paraplegia
- Swelling
- Restriction of mobility of the adjacent joint
- Fractures (bone fractures) after minor trauma, mostly femur (thigh bone) and humerus (upper arm bone) are affected – osteolytic tumors break down bone substance; generally, the bone loses strength due to the tumor
Localization
Typical for primary bone tumors is that they can be assigned to a characteristic localization in addition to a certain age range. They arise clustered at the sites of most intense longitudinal growth (metaepiphyseal/articular area).
The following questions should be answered by diagnostic measures:
- Localization in the skeleton → Which bone is affected?
- Localization in the bone → epiphysis* (joint end of the bone (near the joint)), metaphysis* (transition from epiphysis to diaphysis), diaphysis* (long bone shaft), central, eccentric (not central), cortical (at the solid outer shell of the bone), extracortical, intraarticular (within the joint capsule).
Osteoblastomas occur predominantly in the vertebrae (dorsal/posterior portions) (> 40% of cases), but also in the long tubular bones of the humerus (upper arm bone), femur (thigh bone), and tibia (shin bone).
* Example of the structure of a long bone: epiphysis – metaphysis – diaphysis – metaphysis – epiphysis.