Predicting the probability of malignant pathological type of kidney cancer based on mass size: A retrospective study

Different degrees of malignancy of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) correspond to dissimilar therapies, and the prediction of malignancy of kidney cancer based on tumor size is still not fully studied.

We evaluated a total of 50,776 patients with T1-T2, N0, M0 RCC diagnosed between 2004 to 2015 based on the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. Three and four fuhrman grade clear cell RCC, three and four fuhrman grade papillary RCC, collecting duct RCC, sarcomatoid differentiation RCC and unclassified RCC were classified as aggressive RCC. The other RCC was classified as indolent RCC. The probability of aggressive and indolent was estimated according to tumor size using a logistic regression model. Differences in survival between subgroups were assessed using the Kaplan-Meier method.

There were 38,003 cases of indolent tumor and 12,773 cases of aggressive tumor totally. As tumor size increases, the predicted probability of an aggressive tumor also increases. Concretely, kidney cancers of 2cm, 3cm and 4cm were estimated to be 19.6%, 21.6% and 23.7% more likely to be aggressive. And for the same tumor size, clear cell RCC in men is more likely to be invasive relative to women and other kidney cancer pathology types. In addition, both the overall and tumor-specific survival are longer for indolent tumors than for aggressive tumors.

We evaluated the degree of malignancy of different sizes RCC in a retrospective study. This result may be helpful in the choice of initial therapy strategies for kidney cancer patients.