How Fast Does Kidney Cancer Spread?

Being diagnosed with kidney cancer means many questions. Perhaps the most important are how far has the cancer spread and how fast is it spreading? The exact growth of any cancer will depend on many individual circumstances, including a patient's general health, age and the extent of the disease at diagnosis. Still, oncologists (cancer doctors) do have techniques to measure the extent and rate of cancer growth. This information, in turn, plays an important role in determining how to treat the cancer.

How Fast Can Kidney Cancer Spread?

• The goal in treating any cancer is to find it in the earliest stages, before it spreads to other parts of the body (a process known as metastasis). According to the on-line version of the Merck Manual, a well known medical reference guide, kidney cancer tends to spread at an early stage, meaning it is faster and more aggressive than some cancers.
  Unfortunately, the disease is hard to diagnose during its early, most treatable stages. Symptoms are often minimal at the start, and the kidneys, located deep in the body, rarely show problems during medical exams.
  According to the National Health Service of the United Kingdom, kidney cancer tends to spread through the bloodstream and lymph nodes. From the bloodstream, the cancer can spread to other organs, often the lungs and the liver.

How Soon Do Symptoms Appear?

• Bleeding during urination is usually the earliest symptom of kidney cancer. The bleeding can be minimal, however, and may not be obvious to the patient. Blood in the urine can be detected by laboratory tests, however. As the disease progresses over time, symptoms may include pain in the side, fever and weight loss. The appearance of these later symptoms may reflect the spread of the disease.

Assessing How Fast Kidney Cancer Has Spread

• Doctors use techniques known as grading and staging to assess the spread of kidney cancer. Grading involves making a comparison of the cancerous cells to normal kidney cells. Lower grades (1 and 2) of cancer tend to look much like regular kidney cells. In these grades, the cancer grows and spreads slowly, and treatment is more likely to be effective.
  In higher grades (3 and 4), the cancer does not much resemble other kidney cells, and the spread of the disease is likely to be faster.
  Staging is a method used to assess how far a cancer has grown, and whether it has spread outside the kidney. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the stages of kidney cancer are:
  Stage I: cancer is found only in the kidney.
  Stage II: cancer is in the tissue around the kidney, but not in the bloodstream.
  Stage III: cancer has advanced to the blood and lymph node.
  Stage IV: cancer has spread to other organs.
  Doctors consider staging to be the most reliable indicator of a patient's survival chances. The lower the stage, the greater the chance of living five years or more. According to the American Cancer Society (see Resources), the five-year survival rate for people with slow-growing cancer found only in the kidneys is better than 90 percent. Unfortunately, due to the difficulties with diagnosis, many people have more advanced cancers when their condition is diagnosed. According to the Kidney Cancer Association (see Resources), 35 percent of patients show signs of advanced cancer, and 15 to 25 percent have cancer which has spread to other organs.

Slowing the Speed of Kidney Cancer

• Treatment for kidney cancer can include surgical remove of all or some of the kidney and surrounding tissue, radiation and chemotherapy. In addition, in 2009 the FDA approved new drugs designed to slow the growth of kidney cancer. The medications, known as kinase inhibitors, work by interfering with cell growth, slowing the development of tumors.