Osteosarcoma causes

Causes
The causes of osteosarcoma are not known. Questions remain about whether radium, or fluoride, in drinking water can act as "environmental triggers" for increasing the incidence of the disease.

A low selenium or Vitamin D3 level or a high level of inflammation, as measured by interleukin-6, interleukin-8, or Nf-kB, Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha may have a significant role as tumor suppressors and tumor initiators respectively.

Recent studies show that an increased level of c-Fos can lead to osteosarcoma. The study that showed this result was done on transgenic mice in which the Fluid Sheer Stress (FSS) was increased to increase the number of osteoblast. Since c-Fos is ubiquitous in its overexpression it can not only increase the osteoblast resulting in the symptoms osteosarcoma. Therefore it is recently believed that a biological effect that may cause osteosarcoma is an error in the molecular pathway that controls c-Fos, causing an overexpression with no other counter stimuli to stop over production.