Kidney cancer patients who have only the tumor removed, not the entire kidney, have higher survival rates, a new study finds. The research involved more than 7,000 Medicare patients with early-stage kidney cancer who underwent surgery to remove either the entire organ (radical nephrectomy) or only the tumor and a small margin of healthy tissue around it (partial nephrectomy).
After an average follow-up of five years, 25 percent of patients who had a partial nephrectomy had died, compared with 42 percent of those who had a radical nephrectomy, researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center reported.
