Cancer of kidney, symptoms and treatment
Written by:What is kidney cancer and what symptoms does it present?
It is a common cancer in both men and women , around the 12th solid tumor in order of frequency. It usually appears in the functioning tissue of the kidney and in its expansive growth it reaches to destroy the function of the kidney when it reaches a significant volume it can spread metastasizing. The symptoms of this type of cancer are related to the presence of blood in the urine and, if the tumor reaches a significant volume, the presence of a palpable nodule in the abdomen. However, most of these tumors are detected incidentally , that is, the patient does not suffer any symptoms related to the tumor and are discovered in ultrasound or scan analysis, known as abdominal CT. In which, when performing a scan for another symptom such as any digestive problem or any problem of loss of appetite or any other sign, we detected incidentally the presence of this tumor on the kidney.
What is the treatment, is the removal always necessary?
The treatment of these kidney cancer lesions is a surgical treatment. It is always necessary to remove the entire lesion and sometimes if the volume is important, more than seven centimeters, it is necessary to completely remove the kidney but, in many cases, when it comes to tumors under four centimeters we perform conservative surgery of the kidney, that is, we remove only the external part. There is some alternative treatment by cryosurgery and high intensity ultrasound that is only applied in patients with a very advanced age since they do not reach the same levels of effectiveness as surgical treatment.
After the extirpation, how is the evolution of the patients?
After the surgical removal of these lesions most patients have a good evolution since they do not need any medical or dietary treatment and only in those patients in whom a distant metastasis has occurred will it be necessary to treat the metastasis. Or, to this day, we have anti-angiogenic drugs with the ability to have a good response after taking them in the form of tablets. That means that even if there is metastasis there is the possibility of an effective treatment for this type of process.
