 | Joseph P. Galichia, MD is the founder and Medical Director of the Galichia Medical Group, PA. He is an internationally recognized pioneer in the field of interventional cardiology. In the 70's, Dr. Galichia studied in Zurich, Switzerland with the inventors of the balloon angioplasty technique for treating heart disease. As a result of his experience, he was able to bring this historic technique back to the United States where he was one of the first physicians to perform coronary angioplasty here. A noted medical spokesman, he appears on a weekly Newstalk segment on KWCH Channel 12 and has a weekly syndicated radio talk show on KNSS 1330 AM every Saturday live from 11:00 am to noon. Dr. Galichia may be contacted by sending an e-mail to service@galichia.com |
Health & Medicine
2008-10-01 15:56:00
Tumor on kidney
Answer: There are many kinds of tumors and cysts that can occur on the kidneys. There are benign tumors which we often see but the most dangerous tumor is a malignant growth known as renal cell carcinoma. This particular kind of cancer often remains a-symptomatic until it has spread to other organs. The treatment of renal cell carcinoma is immediate surgery. If the tumor has spread, certain medications and sometimes radiation may be helpful. Early detection of this cancer usually occurs when a patient notices blood in the urine or as an incidental finding on a CAT scan or sonogram. Symptoms may also include pain in the flank, a lump in the flank, weight loss, fatigue, fevers, night sweats and anemia may also be associated with renal cell carcinoma.
There is no known cause of renal cell carcinoma. Cigarette smoking doubles the risk, obesity, occupational exposure to toxins, and occasionally heredity as well as a high fat diet are all implicated in this disease. It is felt that radiation exposure is a risk factor and in your case the treatment of your prostate cancer with cyberknife therapy was itself a high radiation procedure. Most of the radiation using this type of technique was directed in a very specific way to the prostate gland, which is a great advantage of the cyberknife therapy. There is much less scattering of radiation using this technique. Furthermore, neither your hernia operation nor your diet likely contributed to this problem. We do know that one of the great risks of having any kind of cancer is having had a history of previous cancer somewhere else in the body, your prostate cancer having been previously diagnosed.
The first step of evaluating any growth in the kidney is to see if it is cancerous or not. Fortunately, the treatment of renal cancer, with early detection renders relatively good prognosis.
