Chondromyxoid fibroma (fibromyxoid chondroma) of bone. A clinico-pathological study of thirty-two cases.

Chondromyxoid fibroma is the least common benign tumour of cartilage derivation. In 1948 it was described by Jaffe and Lichtenstein as a distinctive entity; formerly it was classified as myxoma (Bloodgood 1924) or a myxomatous variant ofgiant-cell tumour, or mistaken for a malignant lesion, especially chondrosarcoma, chondromyxosarcoma or myxosarcoma. The few cases reported recently in the literature as myxomas or myxofibromas (Bauer and Harell 1954; Scaglietti and Stringa 1956; Marcove, Kambolis, Bullough and Jaffe 1964; Perou, Kolis, Zaeske and Borja 1967) are probably mostly chondromyxoid fibromas, for myxomas of bone seem to be peculiar to thejaws and ofodontogenic origin, and apparently have no counterpart or at least are exceptional in other bones of the skeleton. Because of the relative rarity of chondromyxoid fibroma only a small number of publications exist dealing with more than ten cases. Dahlin (1967) reported twenty cases, The Netherlands Committee on Bone Tumours (1966) eleven, and The Bone Tumour Committee of the Japanese Orthopaedic Association National Cancer Center (1966) forty-one. The major textbooks of Jaffe (1958) (twenty-five cases), Lichtenstein (1965) (thirty-seven cases), Goidanich (1957) (fifteen cases) and Aegerter and Kirkpatrick (1968) (twenty-one cases) do not include precise statistical details. The total of reported well documented cases is only a little more than 100. The frequency ofrecurrences (Ralph 1962) and the mention ofa few cases with malignant (chondrosarcomatous) transformation (Iwata and Coley 1958, Jaffe 1958, Gilmer 1963, Aegerter and Kirkpatrick 1968) induced us to carry out a comparative clinico-pathological study ofthe cases filed in our laboratory during the last twenty-nine years, in order to investigate the possible causes of this evolution and the prognostic significance of some histological features, especially the presence of the rather frequent areas showing marked nuclear atypism. Thirty-two cases, including sixteen specimens resected entire, were available for this study, in which twenty-one patients could be followed for at least one year.