ORLANDO, FL USA (UroToday.com) - Renal cancer at its advanced stage is often associated with tumor thrombus that can either extend into the renal vein or the inferior vena cava. Shingo Hatakeyama presented his group’s assessment of surgical management of tumor thrombus and analysis of its benefit in patients with renal cell carcinoma.
The authors identified 42 patients who had tumor thrombus in a renal vein and 43 patients who had tumor thrombus in the IVC. The authors reviewed factors that could potentially be prognostic in the treatment of these patients. To assess whether surgical treatment would benefit patients with thrombus in the major veins, the authors used propensity score matching to compare whether patients who had received surgical treatment had better overall survival than those who did not receive any therapy. After completing propensity score matching, patients who had undergone surgical treatment for their tumor thrombus had better survival than patients who had not received any surgical treatment.
The authors concluded that patients with surgical treatment for tumor thrombus might do better than patients not receiving surgery. The improved survival, however, needs to be evaluated in a larger sample, and prospectively. The authors did not discuss the reasons for which patients were not treated surgically. The results of this inquiry might increase the meaning of the potentially impactful results the authors observed in their retrospective study.
Presented by Shingo Hatakeyama, MD at the American Urological Association (AUA) Annual Meeting - May 16 - 21, 2014 - Orlando, Florida USA
Hirosaki, Japan
Written by Garen Abedi, MD, University of California (Irvine), and medical writer for UroToday.com
