Longitudinal Patterns of Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer Mortality in Renal Cell Carcinoma Patients by Tumor Stage

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of non-cancer deaths among patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC).

The authors sought to investigate how CVD and RCC death rates change post-RCC diagnosis and time-dependent risk factors for death, across different tumor stages.

Adults diagnosed with a first RCC from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database (2004-2020) were included in this study. Poisson regression was used to model RCC and CVD death rates over 16-year follow-up, identifying a crossover time when the curves intersected, overall and by tumor stage. Fine-Gray competing risk models were implemented to evaluate the time-varying associations of risk factors with CVD and RCC deaths.

Among overall 116,836 RCC patients, the CVD death rate overtook RCC death rate at 13.7 (95% CI: 12.0-15.4) years during follow-up. For stage I RCC patients, the crossover time was sooner at 2.8 (95% CI: 2.0-3.7) years, with all subgroups either experiencing a crossover or having a consistently higher CVD death rate than RCC death rate. No crossover time was identified for stage II-IV overall. Patients aged ≥75 years and non-Hispanic Black patients experienced a crossover time across all tumor stages. Several sociodemographic and clinical characteristics showed consistent associations with short- and long-term mortality from RCC and CVD.

In RCC patients, stage I individuals showed a pronounced trend where CVD death became dominant over RCC death during survivorship, with consistent patterns by different sociodemographic and clinical characteristics. Management of both cancer and CVD during critical periods is essential for improving survival outcomes in RCC patients, with strategies tailored to tumor stage.