What Role Does Screening Play in Kidney Cancer Prevention?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Pavlos Msaouel
In this program:
How is kidney cancer screening utilized in prevention? Watch as Dr. Pavlos Msaouel shares when screening methods are used in people with specific hereditary syndromes or genetic conditions, screening methods that are used, and why screening is not recommended among the general population.
Transcript
Interviewer:
What role does screening play in preventing kidney cancer, and how can people lower their risk for kidney cancer?
Dr. Pavlos Msaouel:
So, screening plays a role in finding kidney cancer earlier when an individual has had no hereditary syndrome, like we mentioned before, a genetic condition that predisposes somebody, increases the risk of somebody for kidney cancer. The most common one is the VHL syndrome, that's the one that's most commonly associated with kidney cancer, but there are many other genetic syndromes, and each one of this hereditary conditions, this hereditary syndromes, comes with its own guidelines on how to screen different organs of the body for different diseases that may be associated with the syndrome, including kidney cancer, so if you have one of the syndromes, you need to follow up with your doctor and that your doctor can teach you the screening guidelines for the syndrome, including for kidney cancer. If you do not have any known syndrome, then we do not normally do screening for kidney cancer, and the reason why we do not do screening for kidney cancer in that situation is we have not found that to be beneficial. When you think about the risks and the benefits, those always need to be considered with screening, and sometimes when you do screening even with an ultrasound, you know the kind of test or just use sound waves to look at your kidneys, you may find something that looks unusual and then that creates a psychological distress, and then you have to do something about it.
And then you may get a biopsy to see what it is, and that biopsy may have complications, it may cause bleeding and it may cause damage in your body, and then you do that biopsy, you find out that this was nothing...those are the risks of all for doing it. And that's why because we haven't found that screening amongst the general population outside of having hereditary syndromes, we haven't found screening to actually be worth the risks of complications. And that's why we don't do it.
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