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Mr Walter Cazzaniga
The Royal Marsden
How is cancer of the kidney diagnosed?
Mr Walter Cazzaniga explains how kidney cancer is often diagnosed incidentally during scans for unrelated symptoms. He outlines the role of imaging, kidney function tests and biopsy, and in this video highlights how results guide personalised treatment options, including surgery or systemic therapy.
Transcript
Normally, kidney cancer is diagnosed incidentally.
A patient goes for a scan for an unrelated reason, let's say abdominal discomfort, and a mass on the kidney is picked up.
At that stage, the patient is referred to a consultant urologist for an opinion and further tests might be needed.
We can potentially do a scan to check the function of your kidney, which is important to define which treatment you're going to have, a scan to see how big is the mass, where the mass is located, which is important for surgical planning.
Some of these masses can be benign, so to some patients a percutaneous biopsy of the mass is offered.
This is a procedure that is done as a day case, where a little piece of tumour is taken and sent for analysis in order to define whether it is a malignant or a benign process.
If it's malignant, then we start with the potential option for treatment, which can be a minimally invasive surgical procedure or systemic treatment if the disease has spread as well.