Renal Medullary Carcinoma: A Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Analysis

Renal medullary carcinoma (RMC) is an aggressive and rare renal malignancy that predominantly affects Black patients but is also found in individuals of other ethnicities. To date, only a few hundred cases have been reported in the urologic literature. Due to this extreme rarity, the exact pathophysiology and optimal treatment have yet to be well described. This study aims to determine the predictors of mortality and overall survival outcomes in patients with RMC.

We utilized the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER) database 18 registries to retrieve demographic and clinical information on patients with RMC between 1996 and 2018. A multivariate analysis was performed to determine predictors of mortality in the study population. Kaplan-Meier survival curves were then created to display the differences in overall survival of Black versus non-Black patients diagnosed with renal medullary carcinoma during the study period.

We identified 100 patients diagnosed with renal medullary carcinoma using the SEER Database in the study period. The mean age was 28.0 ± 12.0 (95% confidence interval [CI] 25.7-30.4). Among the patients, 76% were male and 24% were female. Most RMC patients were Black (83%) with only 17% identifying as White. The mean survival in months was 13.8 ± 3.0 (95% CI 7.9-19.7). The majority (70%) of patients in this study presented with distant, metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis. Black patients with RMC were less likely to receive surgery and five times more likely to die in comparison to their White counterparts OR = 5.4 (95% CI 1.09-26.9, P = 0.04). Not only did Black patients have a lower survival rate at 12 mo compared to White patients, but they also continued to experience a sharp decline in survival to 10.2% at 24 mo (P < 0.05) and 7.6% at 48 mo (P < 0.05) following diagnosis of renal medullary carcinoma.

These data confirm that RMC is a rare disease that disproportionately affects Black patients. The prognosis appears to be substantially worse for Black subjects diagnosed with this cancer than non-Black patients. The worse outcomes seen in Black subjects are of an unclear etiology and are yet to be investigated.