Kids with Kidney Cancer Get Good News from St Jude
A study conducted at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital has shown that some kids with kidney cancers classified “inoperable” may actually be able to keep normal kidney function with the help of a surgical procedure called nephron-sparing surgery.
Between 1999 and 2006, St Jude conducted nephron-sparing surgery, otherwise known as partial nephrectomy, on 10 kidney cancer patients under age 10 with bilateral Wilms tumors. Although the tumors appeared inoperable on the preoperative imaging scans, surgeons found they were able to remove the malignant tumors while sparing enough healthy tissue to preserve the child’s renal function.
Children with bilateral Wilms tumors often have one or both kidneys removed in an attempt to eliminate the cancer. If both kidneys are removed, the child requires dialysis and a possible kidney transplant.
Approximately 500 children are diagnosed with Wilms tumors each year in the US and approximately 5 percent of them will have tumors in both kidneys.
All the patients included in the St Jude study successfully treated with nephron-sparing surgery had favorable cell characteristics (histology) as well as chemotherapy and radiation treatments – and all of them are still alive. Nine of them still exhibited normal renal function at their most recent exams. As the study’s senior author stated,
“Many times, physicians will look at a child’s scans and assume that it is impossible to remove the tumor while preserving some uninvolved kidney, but our study indicates that surgeons should not rely solely on the imaging to make that decision.”
Andrew M. Davidoff, MD
Division Chief, General Pediatric Surgery
St Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Authors from the University of Tennessee, Memphis, the University of Washington and the Children’s National Medical Center also participated in the study. If you’d like to learn more about their research, it has been published online in the March 24, 2008, edition of the journal Cancer.
Source: St Jude Children’s Research Hospital News
Related Links: NCI; stanfordstjude.com; ScienceDaily; medpagetoday.com; CNN
Related Video: Giving Back at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital from MSNBC
Technorati Tags: renal cell carcinoma; surgical oncology; rare diseases; ALSAC; nephroblastoma; cancer treatment
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