EVALUATION OF PROGNOSTIC FACTORS IN PATIENTS WITH STAGE 1 RENAL CELL CARCINOMA

: During the past thirty-five years, we treated 221 patients with stage 1 renal cell carcinoma. We classified these patients into two groups: 175 patients who did not show recurrence and 45 patients who showed recurrence (excluding one patient who died of other disease). We investigated factors which affect the recurrence after nephrectomy and the survival after recurrence in these two groups. We found two major factors such as tumor diameter and tumor grade which affected the recurrence of renal cell carcinoma. Of these two factors, the grade of malignancy affected the prognosis of the patients with stage 1. Furthermore, as a result of long-term observation, we found that patients with grade I showed good prognosis compared with these with grade II, III and IV. The patients who showed weight loss constituted the majority of recurrent patients. Anaemia, erythrocyte sedimentation rate and positive reaction of C-reactive protein in addition to weight loss were major factors affecting the prognosis of stage 1 patients. In an effort to analysing the features of recurrent patients, there observed that no significant difference of the non-recurrent rate was detected between the patients who showed cancer death after nephrectomy and the patients who were living after nephrectomy. In analysing metastatic lesions and numbers of metastatic foci, we detected relatively long-term survival especially in patients with less than 3 foci of metastases in the lung, compared to those with multiple foci. Furthermore, we found dimension of the metastasis depended on the grade of the primary lesion.