Acute kidney injury in cancer patients

Objective We want to know the causes of AKI in oncology patients, including disease-related complications and the nephrotoxicity of chemotherapy drugs, in order to provide more useful clinical information. Methods In this review, an electronic search of the English language literature was performed in the database PubMed, with the results enriched by manual searches and citation mining, factors investigated in the selected articles included acute kidney injury, oncology, chemotherapy, anticancer drug, antitumor drug. Results According to the searched articles, we summarized the causes (including pre-renal, intrinsic renal, and post-renal lesion) of AKI in cancer patients and the corresponding management measures. Among the pre-renal factors we mainly described hypercalcemia, hematopoietic cell transplantation, post-renal factors we mainly described hemorrhagic cystitis, and intrinsic renal factors we mainly described thrombotic microangiopathy, chemotherapeutics, tumor lysis syndrome, cast nephropathy, in which the emphasis was on chemotherapy drug associated AKI and its treatment. Conclusions AKI is not uncommon in cancer patients, and has diverse causes and negative outcomes. Both nephrologists and oncologists need to be aware of the unique reasons of AKI in this population and its optimal management.