Surgical treatment of metastases from renal cell carcinoma.

Introduction: Even if the number of curable renal cancers increased during the last decades, there is still a considerable amount of patients with distant metastases, evidenced at diagnosis or during the follow-up, without real curative therapeutic options.
Materials and Methods: In the period between January 1983 and December 2003 we observed 252 metastatic patients among the 1187 surgically treated for renal cancer (21.2%). The metastatic disease was evidenced at the diagnosis of renal tumour in 118 patients (9.9%), during the follow up at a mean distance of 18.6 months in 134 (11.3%) and was in a single organ in 200 patients, in multiple sites in 52. A surgical treatment of metastases was performed in 113 cases, associated with chemo-immunotherapy in 16. Conversely, 44 patients received chemo-immunotherapy alone, 18 radiotherapy, and in the remaining 77 cases no curative therapies were applied.
Results: The patients with a single-site metastasis who underwent of metastases removal, especially when pulmonary or adrenal, showed a better prognosis than the ones otherwise treated, while in the patients with bony metastases, multiple-site metastases and the ones who did not receive any curative therapies an extremely dismal prognosis was evidenced. However, a large amount of the patients with a single-site metastasis (79% on 159 treated patients) had a relapse of the disease, even when surgically treated (69%).
Conclusions: At present, in the lack of any effective systemic therapies for metastatic renal cancer, surgery offers better survival rates than other choices (chemo-immunotherapy or radiotherapy). Thus, even if the initial bias in the selection of patients is surely significant, in our opinion, each patient with good performance status and a resectable metastatic lesion, better if pulmonary or adrenal, should undergo surgical treatment of metastases, that could provide long-term survival in a small part of the patients. The high rate of relapses remarks the actual need of an effective systemic therapy both for the patients who can and cannot undergo surgery for their metastatic disease.