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.
Read more about this topic: Kidney Cancer
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“To me, nothing can be more important than giving children books, It’s better to be giving books to children than drug treatment to them when they’re 15 years old. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn’t have to put them in prisons?”
—Fran Lebowitz (20th century)
“[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of their own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child’s duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)