Abstract
– Clinical evaluation of patients with kidney tumours should provide several parameters with possible prognostic value, such as age, sex, incidental discovery, duration of symptoms, weight loss, fever, disease-free interval, performance status, elevated ESR, hypercalcemia, elevated gamma-enolase, local tumour extension, invasion of renal vein and inferior vena cava, lymphatic metastases, distant metastases, tumour dimension, multicentricity, bilaterality and growth velocity. Some of these factors correlate to prognosis in univariate statistical analysis; in multivariate analysis, however, tumour stage is the best prognostic factor, while the other parameters show less or no prognostic value. Besides tumour stage, parameters with an independent value are performance status, weight loss, elevated ESR. Using these prognostic factors, patients can be divided into groups with different prognosis and treatment.
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