UroToday - Laparoscopic Cytoreductive Nephrectomy: The M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Experience: "Laparoscopic Cytoreductive Nephrectomy: The M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Experience

Written by Ralph V. Clayman, MD
Thursday, 09 November 2006 Laparoscopic Cytoreductive Nephrectomy: The M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Experience

The paper from MD Anderson shows a shorter hospital stay for these patients who have metastatic kidney cancer. Urologists have been removing these kidneys since there have been studies showing an increased survival with removal of the kidney prior to immunotherapy.

I looked at our patients from Indiana University when I was a resident there and found similar shorter hospital stays, but most of our patients did not receive immunotherapy right away after removal of the kidney, sometimes observed for months. Although this study showed similar time to receiving immunotherapy (44 days), there may have been other factors as opposed to when patients were recovered enough to receive it.

I recently operated on an elderly gentleman who we thought had advanced kidney cancer that had spread to his rib cage, but biopsies of the rib mass and analysis from the kidney that I removed revealed a localized kidney cancer and a lung cancer. He spent 2 nights in the hospital after a left robotic kidney removal and was able to start chemotherapy for his lung cancer within 2 weeks of his robotic surgery.