Men are more often to encounter with kidney cancer illness over woman. By public estimate, the totals of men facing the illness are two times greater than women.

In fact, the kidney cancer risk is increased with age. More than 90 percent of the cases involved which are diagnosed with kidney cancer are patients who were 45 years old and more.

President of Malaysian Clinical Oncology Association and Oncology Specialist, Dr Gucharan Singh Khera, said generally during the time it was diagnosed, the cancer already been metastasis (spread to other part of the body) amongst a third of the patients. Dr Gucharan said, until now 208,000 people worldwide are found suffering kidney cancer each year while 102,000 individual were died resulted from the disease each year. Last year, 51,000 case of kidney cancer have been diagnosed in the United States which involved 13,000 deaths. He said, although there are advanced effort in understanding the growth mechanism of various kind of cancers, kidney cancer is still a disease which is not yet fully understood.

“When the kidney cancer have advanced to the next level, it is very hard to control. Generally kidney cancer is a disease which does not react to chemotherapy or hormone therapy,” he said. Based on the second report of National Cancer Index about the cancer’s cases in Malaysia for 2003, there were 305 cases of kidney cancer confirmed by diagnosis in The Peninsular.

Risk Factors

• Patient whose undergo renal dialysis and those who have kidney cancer history in their family faces high risk to be attack by the disease.
• Smoking is the key risk factor to kidney cancer. Smokers face twice the probability to face kidney cancer over them who do not smoke.
• Obesity and long-term use of pain killer may also invite this problem.

Symptoms

• Blood in urine
• Backache
• Prolonged aches on body side
• Aches or abdomen expansions
• Weight loss caused by unknown reason
• Anorexia or loss of appetite
• Fatigue

Treatments

The treatment for kidney cancer depends to the disease seriousness stage and the patient’s overall state of health. The major therapy for kidney cancer is surgery. However, it is only effective if all of the cancer can be removed. Radiation therapy also could be done when the cancer has spread outside of the kidney.

Apart from that, patients can undergo chemotherapy treatment but the treatment can only be done to some patients only. There is new therapy method used to kidney cancer patients, which act to specific areas of the cancer cell. It is effective in the treatment of advanced kidney cancer patients. This includes drugs intake to prevent the growth of new cancer cell and drugs that target other important cell’s growth factors.