Development of urological cancers in renal transplant recipients: 30‐year experience at the Frankfurt Transplant Center

Fatal post-transplant malignancies with a high proportion of genitourinary neoplasms represent a serious long-term challenge. With continuous improvement of the allograft and patient survival, cancer development after renal transplantation may soon turn to the leading morbidity cause. In a retrospective single-center study of 1990 renal transplant recipients between November 1979 and November 2009, records of patients with urological neoplasms including epidemiological, clinical and survival parameters were accessed. Sixty-six de novo urological malignancies in 58 recipients were recorded in the study period, being most common after skin cancers (15.6% of enregistered tumors). From these, 29 were renal cell cancers, including five neoplasms of transplanted kidney, 24 transitional cell carcinomas, 11 prostate carcinomas, and two germ cell carcinomas with incidence rates of 1.5%, 1.2%, 0.9% and 0.2%, respectively. The patient follow up was virtually complete. Tumor-related death was found in 44% of cases. By multivariate analysis, no influence of either duration of dialysis, mode or duration of immunosuppression, gender or age at transplantation on overall patient survival could be demonstrated. This study, documenting a 30-year single center experience, emphasizes the increased risk for urological neoplasms occuring after renal transplantation. Screening strategies for urological cancers should be optimized. (Cancer Sci 2010; 101: 2430–2435)