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Kidney Cancer Survival Rate Information

13th December, 2010 - Posted by health news - No Comments

To calculate the kidney cancer survival rate, you must take several different factors into consideration. Generally speaking, these factors are related to the patient who has been diagnosed with kidney cancer, and the kidney cancer stage..

In gathering their survival rate statistics, researchers take the type of cancer, stage, grade and location into consideration. As far as patient-related factors are concerned, researchers must take age, ability to undergo treatment, and general state of health into consideration in coming up with their numbers.

By crunching numbers from such data in recent years, researchers have come up with some generally reliable statistics on kidney cancer survival rates. Just one type of kidney cancer is shown below, but it is far more common than any other variety. It is known as renal cell carcinoma.

The kidney cancer survival rate is usually shown as a percentage of patients who have similar types of kidney cancer at similar stages.

It should be said that the kidney cancer survival rate is a generalization based on a huge number of cases that occurred over a long time. There’s no way to predict what will happen in any individual case.

As is the case with most other diseases, the kidney cancer survival rate is measured in five year periods. That is to say, there will still be a certain percentage of kidney cancer patients alive five years after they’ve been diagnosed.

The kidney cancer survival rate can be viewed through a number of different demographic categories.. The statistics you’ll find below reflect research done from 1995-2001. It compares the survival rate of kidney cancer patients to the population as a whole.

The overall kidney cancer survival rate determined in this study was almost 65 percent.

The data was also broken into categories that specified race and gender.

* 64.7 percent of Caucasian men were still alive after five years
* 64.5 percent of Caucasian women lived at least five years
* The percentage for African American men was somewhat lower at 61.8 percent
* African American women enjoyed the highest survival rate of all at 65.9 percent

The stage the cancer has reached is also important to know. The stage describes the location of cancer cells. The more the cancer has spread beyond the kidneys, the higher the stage number assigned to it.

A little more than half of all kidney cancer cases are discovered before the disease has metastacized, or spread to other parts of the body beyond the kidneys.

20 percent of all kidney cases are diagnosed in a so-called “regional” stage. This means the disease can now be found in lymph nodes, tissues, or organs that are close to the origin of the cancer (one or both kidneys).

Slightly more than one in five cases – 22 percent – are diagnosed when cancer cells have reached distant tissues or organs.

Stages were unclear in the rest of the kidney cancer cases that were included in the study..

You won’t be surprised to learn that the sooner the cancer was diagnosed, the longer the patient was likely to survive.

* When kidney cancer was diagnosed before it had spread to other tissues or organs, 90 percent of patients lived five years or more.
* When the cancer had spread to the immediate region around the kidneys, those surviving five years or more dropped to 60 percent.
* The survival rate was just under 10 percent for those patients whose cancer had already spread to distant organs or parts of the body.
* Information on stages was unclear, unknown or undiagnosed for the rest of the patients in the study.

The highest percentage of kidney cancer occurs in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, along with Northern Europe. Kidney cancer occurs least often in China, Thailand and the Philippines. Kidney cancer accounts for approximately three percent of all cancers diagnosed in the U.S.

Smokers have a higher risk of getting kidney cancer by approximately double. The risk is even greater for smokers with renal pelvis cancer, with four times as many getting the disease as non-smokers.

Related topics: kidney cancer survival rate information and cancer of the kidney.

Neal Kennedy is a retired TV and radio reporter. To read more of his articles, click on Kidney Disorders