Objective: To investigate the clinical characteristics of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) in female patients.
Methods: The clinical characteristics including sex, age at diagnosis, histological tumor size, histological subtype, Fuhrman nuclear grade and pathological tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage of 881 consecutive patients treated with (partial) nephrectomy for RCC from 1998 to 2006 were analyzed. Characteristics of different gender groups and different female age groups were compared. The one-way anova and t-test were used to compare means. Pearson's chi(2)-test and the likelihood ratio test were used to compare ratios.
Results: Low-grade tumors accounted for 79.3% of female patients and 64.1% of male patients (P < 0.001). The percentage of stage T1-2 was 76.6% in female patients while it was only 68.5% in male patients (P = 0.011). Also, female patients had more T1-2N0M0 tumors (73.0% vs 64.3%, P = 0.009). Once female patients were classified into three groups according to age diagnosis (<or=40, 41-59 and >or=60 years) young female patients seemed to have more tumors with unfavorable histology (8.7% vs 5.1% vs 4.3%), Fuhrman grade 3-4 (23.9% vs 23.1% vs 17.7%) and stage T3-4 (28.3% vs 23.1% vs 22.0%).
Conclusion: Compared with male patients, female patients had lower stage and grade tumors. However, younger female patients had more tumors with unfavorable histology, and higher stage and grade compared to older female patients.