Kidney Cancer - Signs, Symptoms and Treatment

Kidney cancer refers to a disease where malignant tumors develop on the kidney.  The human body has two kidneys.  They are organs with a bean shape located at the rear of the abdomen.  The kidneys have important functions necessary for survival. The most important is filtering the blood and taking waste products from it, while also making sure the electrolytes within the blood are balanced correctly.  The kidneys also produce enythropoietin.  This is a hormone which produces red blood cells.
 
A tumor is defined as a mass of cells which are growing abnormally and out of control.  A benign tumor is one which, though it has uncontrolled growth of the cells, does not invade other body tissues and does not spread to other parts of the body.  A malignant tumor, on the other hand, has the ability to invade neighboring tissues and spread throughout the body.  A malignant tumor is what we call cancer.  And when this cancer occurs in the kidney's cortex or in the renal pelvis, this is known as kidney cancer.

Each year, about 31,000 Americans are diagnosed with kidney cancer.  Most of these cancer patients are age 50 to 70.  It strikes men more than women, and blacks more than whites.  There are several risk factors linked with a higher probability of developing kidney cancer.  Most prominent is smoking cigarettes.  People who smoke have been noted to have two times the risk of getting the cancer.  In fact, smoking is directly linked with as much as two out of every three cancers of any kind.  A person's chance of getting kidney cancer also goes up if he is obese, has high blood pressure, has one of several hereditary diseases, or has experienced analgesic abuse.

Although nobody can 100 percent eliminate the chance of getting kidney cancer, he can lower his risk.  The best way is to not start smoking, and if you do smoke, to stop.  You lower your risk by half by doing so. 

Some of the more common signs and symptoms of kidney cancer include blood in the urine, pain in the abdomen, and a flank mass.  Blood in the urine is most common among the symptoms, and sometimes is visible, but other times, detected only in lab tests.  In later stages, symptoms might include weight loss, fever, night sweats, hypertension, liver problems and increased level of calcium in the blood.
 
The only known curative treatment method for kidney cancer is surgical removal.  This procedure is called a nephrectomy.  In this operation, the entire kidney associated with the cancer is removed.  Usually some of the surrounding lymph nodes are also removed, as this has been shown to improve the patient's chances of survival.
 
Initially, radiation therapy (using high energy x-rays in an effort to kill cancerous cells) is not often used.  However, in some cases, where the tumor is determined to be too large to be completely removed by surgery, it is sometimes useful to get rid of the part of the tumor that still remains.