BERKELEY, CA (UroToday.com) - In the past decades, people began paying more and more attention to cancer screening since cancer is a disease that, if treated early, is more likely to have a favorable outcome. For kidney tumor patients, imaging technologies such as CT and MRI have greatly facilitated this trend so that more and more patients are now presenting with localized, rather than advanced disease, compared with 10 years ago.
Facing patients with small renal tumors that could be of low-grade renal cell carcinoma (RCC), non-aggressive, or even benign lesions, it has become difficult for physicians to say whether extirpative therapy is necessary. Thus, every single clue we can get from the tumor before treatment is important.
In the article we tried to employ a simple method to evaluate the visceral fat area of renal tumor patients and to evaluate its association with tumor grade. We found that increased visceral obesity was strongly associated with higher Fuhrman grade in patients with cT1a RCC.
While physicians can benefit from the result and facilitate patient consultation, on the other hand, we have again raised the discussion of how obesity may affect cancer. We believe visceral fat somehow influences the development of RCC. However, further studies are needed to confirm these findings and discover the underlying biological mechanism.
Written by:
Hongkai Wang as part of Beyond the Abstract on UroToday.com. This initiative offers a method of publishing for the professional urology community. Authors are given an opportunity to expand on the circumstances, limitations etc... of their research by referencing the published abstract.
Department of Urology, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Shanghai, China Department of Radiology, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Shanghai, China
Visceral obesity and risk of high-grade disease in clinical t1a renal cell carcinoma - Abstract
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