Objectives: To examine the population-based survival rates of patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC) treated with cytoreductive nephrectomy (CNT) and compare them with those of patients treated without surgery.
Methods: Of the 43,143 patients with RCC identified in the 1988-2004 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database, 5372 had metastatic RCC. Of those, 2447 were treated with CNT (45.5%) and 2925 (54.5%) were not. Univariable and multivariable Cox regression models, as well as matched and unmatched Kaplan-Meier survival analyses, were used. The covariates consisted of age, sex, tumor size, and year of diagnosis.
Results: The 1-, 2-, 5-, and 10-year overall survival rate of the patients treated with CNT was 53.6%, 36.3%, 19.4%, and 12.7% compared with 18.5%, 7.4%, 2.3%, and 1.2% for the no-surgery patients, respectively. The corresponding cancer-specific survival rates were 58.1%, 40.8%, 24.3%, and 18.8% and 24.4%, 11.0%, 4.1%, and 2.9% for the same patient groups. On multivariate analysis, independent predictor status was recorded for treatment type, tumor size, and patient age (all P <.001). Also, relative to CNT, the no-surgery group had a 2.5-fold greater rate of overall and cancer-specific mortality (P <.001). In the matched analyses, virtually the same effect was recorded (hazard ratio 2.6, P <.001).
Conclusion: The results of our study have shown that CNT significantly improves the survival of patients with metastatic RCC.