Yair Lotan

MD

University of Texas Southwestern

Professor of Urology

NLST (Learn more about this study)

NLST-92

Oct 9, 2014

Identifying Optimal Cohort for Renal Cell Cancer Screening

Kidney cancer is the 6th most common cancer in men and 8th most common cancer in women with an estimated 63,910 cases in the U.S. for 2014. The incidence is rising in part due to use of cross sectional imaging but about 1/3 of patients still present with metastatic disease. Screening is not currently used to detect kidney cancer. There have been efforts to use renal ultrasound for early detection of kidney cancer but this has not been efficient when used sporadically in population-based studies.
There are countries where ultrasound is used by primary care physicians to help with their physical exam. There remains a question whether there are populations of sufficient risk to justify screening of certain populations for kidney cancer. Age, BMI and smoking intensity are both risk factors for renal cell carcinoma.

The questions we seek to address include determining the true incidence of kidney cancer in a high risk cohort of subjects with a history of heavy smoking,
We will try to identify the risk of kidney cancer in the NLST stratified by age, gender, BMI and smoking history to try to identify those subjects with highest risk of kidney cancer. This will help identify the highest risk patients for a possible kidney cancer screening trial.