Renal cell carcinoma: new prognostic factors?

Purpose of review There are limited independent predictors of survival in patients with renal cell carcinoma. Factors related to the tumor, host and treatment may help us to predict prognosis to a certain extent. Prognostic indicators would enable selection of patients who can benefit from adjuvant therapy and thus should be enrolled in clinical trials. This review highlights developments in the identification of current prognosticators for patients with renal cell carcinoma. Recent findings Tumor stage, grade and patient-performance status are the known prognostic indicators in renal cell carcinoma. Besides these parameters, many molecular and cytogenetic markers were evaluated recently. Unfortunately, none of these parameters appear to be a better predictive prognostic factor than the usual staging and grading. Therefore, efforts to identify new markers for tumor proliferation and progression are still ongoing. It was recently reported that low carbonic anhydrase 9 staining may be an independent poor prognostic factor in patients with renal cell carcinoma. Moreover, there is increasing interest in prognostic indices and predictive algorithms for survival. Staging systems that combine the pathological features with additional prognostic variables have been constructed to predict outcome. The UCLA Integrated Staging System seems to be superior to staging alone in differentiating patients' survival. Summary Although the literature reviewed contains numerous promising clinical, histological, molecular and cytogenetic parameters, none of them has yet been shown to have an independent prognostic value.