kidney Cancer Treatments Available

Surgical is the only known curative treatment for kidney cancer. The procedure that is most often done in the case of kidney cancer is called a nephrectomy. This procedure includes the removal of the entire kidney that is involved with tumor The surgical procedure also usually includes removing at least some of the lymph nodes surrounding the kidney, which has shown to increase survival in patients with kidney cancer. So-called partial nephrectomies (where only a part of the kidney is removed) may be utilized in some patients with small tumors. This should only be attempted in patients with tumors <4cm. If the tumor can be completely removed, the risk of the tumor coming back in the remaining part of the kidney is about 5%. Therefore, this treatment is very effective.

For larger tumors that require total nephrectomy, the adrenal gland and the fat surrounding the kidney and adrenal gland may need to be removed in order for the entire tumor to be removed.

Even if the kidney cancer has spread to a single different part of the body, a nephrectomy may be recommended, as it has been shown to improve survival. If there are many sites of disease, however, nephrectomy has not been shown to be useful.

Radiation therapy makes the use of high energy x-rays to kill cancer cells. It does this by damaging the DNA in tumor cells. Normal cells in our bodies can repair radiation damage much more quickly than tumor cells can, so while tumor cells are killed by radiation, many normal cells are not. This is the basis for the use of radiation therapy in cancer treatment. Radiation is delivered using large machines that produce the high energy x-rays. Radiation therapy, however, is not routinely used in the initial treatment of kidney cancer.. Radiation may be considered for patients whose tumors are too large to be completely removed; after as much surgical removal as possible is performed, radiation may be useful in treating tumor that remains. This treatment is experimental and should be done only as part of a clinical trial.

Radiation may also be used as a method for pain relief in patients who have pain from kidney cancer that has spread to other regions of the body.

Chemotherapies are drugs that are used to kill tumor cells. Up to this point, there is no chemotherapy regimen that has been consistently shown to be efficacious in the treatment of curative or metastatic kidney cancer. New modalities are constantly being investigated, including interferon, anti-angiogenesis agents (which inhibit the tumor from growing more blood vessels), and molecular agents that target specific genes that may be essential for the tumor cells' survivals.