Archive for the Renal Cell Cancer category.

This is a slide which shows a medullary carcinoma

Posted on January 5th, 2008 by admin in Renal Cell Cancer

This is a slide which shows a medullary carcinoma of the kidney. I think you can appreciate that the organization of this tumor and the appearance of the slides is much less differentiated than in the run-of-the-mill renal cell carcinoma. These do tend to appear much more like adenocarcinomas on histologic section. I’ve tended to treat these people also with chemotherapy rather than immunotherapy, and I tend to treat these as an adenocarcinoma of unknown primary. Although I don’t think there is very much data one way or another about how to treat these patients.
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Now when renal cell carcinoma presents, the classic triad is hematuria, abdominal mass and pain, but only 9% of the patients have the classic triad. About 50% of the patients will have at least one of these three findings. There is also a syndrome which I’m going to talk about in a little bit, where some patients will present with constitutional symptoms; weight loss, anemia, and fever. These constitutional symptoms are probably related to cytokine production by either the tumor or the tumor infiltrating lymphocytes. I’ll be talking a little bit more about this later.
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Now this slide doesn’t project very well, but fortunately the important information is summarized here. With respect to staging of renal cell carcinoma, the staging for renal cell carcinoma changed in 2006, so some of the tables that are in the textbooks are out of date. I was looking at the Lippincott table in the staging manual that they have there, it doesn’t include this up-to-date staging system. It’s simplified in many respects. The T1 tumors are less than 7 centimeters and the T2 tumors are greater than 7 centimeters. These represent then stage I and stage II disease respectively. The T3 tumors invade into the major veins, the adrenal gland or the perinephric tissues and are one of the subgroups that constitute your stage III disease, the T3 tumors. If you have lymph node involvement in a single lymph node, that is considered N1 disease. If you have involvement in more than one lymph node – not a lymph node grouping, but a lymph node – that’s considered to be N2 disease. In other words, involvement of more than one lymph node, is considered to be stage IV disease.

Treatments for Renal Cell Cancer

Posted on December 27th, 2007 by Canadian Health in Renal Cell Cancer

This is the histologic appearance of the clear cell carcinomas. It’s obvious why this tumor is called a clear cell carcinoma. You look at the morphology of the cells and the nuclei here. Compare that with this slide where there is a granular appearance. This is basically the same type of a tumor. So both this appearance and the clear cell appearance, that I just showed you, are considered to be the run-of-the-mill, garden variety, renal cell carcinoma. So that the tumors, the majority of the renal cell carcinomas that you see, can have either that clear cell appearance or this granular appearance. And as you see, the morphology of these cells is very similar, except that the cytoplasm stains pinkish. But the morphology of the nuclei is very similar, the morphology of the cells is very similar. There used to be a distinction between these two but these are really both classified as clear cell carcinomas. And are treated in the same fashion.

This is a histologic example of papillary carcinoma and you can see the papillary fronds of the tumor. And there is some debate as to whether papillary carcinomas represent a better prognosis or about the same prognosis as the more common clear cell carcinomas. This was from a report in 2006 where they found that in their review, papillary carcinomas tended to present at an earlier stage and the survival for the earlier stages was better than those for what they are calling conventional renal cell carcinomas. This was true not only for stage I but across stages as well, it seemed like survival was better. Like I said, there is some controversy about this but there are some authors who feel that the papillary carcinomas have a better prognosis.

This is simply a slide of a chromophobe renal cell carcinoma. I just included it for completeness. I don’t really have a lot to say about this minor variant. This is a transitional cell carcinoma which will arise in the renal pelvis. And the most important thing about this tumor is that you remember to treat it as if it was a bladder carcinoma, with respect to chemotherapy. These tumors I do not treat with immunotherapy but I do treat them with MVAC-type regimens. The tumor arises in the transitional epithelium in the pelvis so it makes a lot of logical sense and as well, as it turns out, clinical sense to treat these tumors in that fashion.

Renal Cell Cancer

Posted on December 27th, 2007 by Canadian Health in Renal Cell Cancer

Renal cell carcinoma constitutes about 3% of all malignancies, so it’s not a common tumor. There’s about 25,000 cases annually in the United States that that results in about 10,000 deaths. There’s a male to female predominance of 2:1 and there’s a similar incidence in both black and white populations. It is a disease of the elderly; most of the cases present in ages 50-70, although certainly presentations in younger patients occur. The youngest patient I’ve had is somebody who is 16-years-old when he developed a renal cell carcinoma. There is an increased risk associated with cigarette smoking and the disease occurs in sporadic and familial forms.
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Now the von Hippel-Lindau syndrome is not a major health problem in the United States but it was useful in defining the genetic abnormalities that occur in both an inherited form of renal cell carcinoma as well as an acquired form. In general, those abnormalities occur on chromosome 3. This just summarizes some of the features of the von Hippel-Lindau syndrome. A multi-focal, bilateral clear cell carcinoma of the kidney occurs in about 35% of the patients with this syndrome. In your hand-out there’s a diagram of where the genetic abnormalities occur on chromosome 3 in VHL. Chromosomal abnormalities in the same area occur in patients with acquired clear cell carcinomas of the kidney as well. There is also a hereditary form of renal cell carcinoma which manifests as papillary tumors. These chromosomal abnormalities are on chromosome 8 and the median age of patients with this tumor is 52-years. Now there is a third, what I would consider hereditary, form of renal cell carcinoma and this is a much rarer form of the disease. These are renal medullary carcinomas and they occur in young patients with the sickle cell trait. Advanced presentation is typical and these tumors typically pursue a very aggressive course. The median survival is 15 weeks. As these things go, I saw three cases of this syndrome in the space of about four months when I was at the Lombardi Cancer Center and then didn’t see any others for the remaining time that I was there. So it is a fairly uncommon presentation but if you have a young patient, especially if they are African-American, it might be useful to check them for sickle cell trait; especially if they have a medullary-type of histology.
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These are the subtypes of renal cell carcinoma. The majority of the renal cell carcinomas are what we call clear cell carcinomas. About 70% of patients. The papillary version, which is also referred to as a chromophilic tumor, occurs in about 20% of the patients. Chromophobics are 5% and then other histology’s, including the renal medullary carcinomas and the transitional cell carcinomas and the collecting duct tumors, represent the other 5%. There’s a sarcomatoid variant which I’ll talk about in a little bit, which is actually a variant of the clear cell carcinomas.