[Nephroblastoma in children and adolescents - prognostic factors at diagnosis and in relapse]

Nephroblastoma is the most common primary malignant renal neoplasm in childhood, which represents 6-8% of childhood malignancies. Multimodal therapy consisted of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, lead to an improvement in an overall cure rate to approximately 85%. However, in 15% of patients relapse of Wilms' tumour occurs, and this refers also to patients qualified according to current prognostic criteria to the group of favourable prognosis. The aim of this paper is a review of the literature about prognostic parameters in nephroblastoma, with the main focus on new parameters related to the biology of this tumour. These could be helpful in the future in an early identification of patients, in whom relapse of nephroblastoma occurs despite of presently used favourable prognostic factors.