Kidney Cancer - Treatment

Treatment

Treatment for kidney cancer depends on the type and stage of the disease. Usually treatment doesn't involve chemotherapy and radiotherapy, as kidney cancers often do not respond to these treatments.

If the cancer has not spread, it will usually be removed by surgery. Sometimes this involves removing the whole kidney, which is called nephrectomy. But surgery is not always possible - for example the patient may have other medical conditions that prevent it, or the cancer may have spread around the body and doctors may not be able to remove it. There is currently no evidence that body-wide medical therapy after surgery where there is no known residual disease, that is, adjuvant therapy, helps to improve survival in kidney cancer.

If the cancer can't be cured with surgery, sometimes doctors may use other techniques such as cryotherapy (freezing the tumour away) or radiofrequency ablation (burning the tumour away). However these are not yet used as standard treatments for kidney cancer. Other treatment options include biological therapies (drug treatments that use natural substances from the body) such as Everolimus (Afinitor), Temsirolimus (Torisel), Sorafenib (Nexavar), Sunitinib (Sutent), and Axitinib (Inlyta) the use of immunotherapy including interferon and interleukin-2. Immunotherapy has the potential to induce complete remissions or durable partial remissions in some patients, although it works in only about 10 to 15% of patients.

In Wilms' tumor (a type of kidney cancer that affects children), chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery are the accepted treatments, depending on the stage of the disease when it is diagnosed. Other rare forms of kidney cancer are not discussed here.