Bone cancer is caused by errors that occur in a cell's DNA, which cause the cells to grow, multiply and survive abnormally.
Although the exact cause or primary bone cancer is not fully known and there's no clear lifestyle related causes of bone cancer or any specific risk factors that increase your chances of developing bone cancer.
However the risk factors and underlying causes of bone cancer include benign bone growths, bone diseases, prior cancer treatments and genetic conditions.
People that have hereditary benign tumor syndromes, like Ollier's disease or osteochondromas have a higher risk of these tumors become cancerous and leading to bone cancer.
Non cancerous benign bone conditions, like for example Paget's disease of the bone, also predispose you to osteosarcoma later in your life.
And high dose external radiation therapy as well as certain chemotherapy medications like alkylating agents for other cancers can also damage your healthy bone cells and raise your risk of developing of a secondary bone tumor.
And even genetic conditions and inherited changes in DNA increase your risk of bone cancer development.
Conditions like Rothmund Thomson syndrome, hereditary retinoblastoma and Li-Fraumeni syndrome are also very strongly linked to bone cancer like osteosarcoma bone cancer.
There's also a distinction between the types of bone tumors, which include metastatic cancer and primary cancer.
Metastatic cancer is cancer that begins in another part of the body, like the breast, lung, prostate, kidney or thyroid and spreads to the bone.
This is much more common than that of primary bone cancer.
And primary bone cancer is bone cancer that originates from the bone itself and is quite rare and accounts for less than 0.2 percent of all cancers.