Oncologic Impact of Renal Tissue Adjacent to Renal Cell Carcinoma

Aim: The aim of the study was to investigate the clinical impact of the surgical margin width after nephron-sparing surgery (NSS) on the oncological course of renal cell carcinoma (RCC).

Patients and methods: The study comprised of 126 RCC patients with NSS between 2002 and 2009. Inclusion criteria were negative resection margins and a tumor diameter of ≤100 mm with the possibility of a complete circumferential histopathological reevaluation. The minimal benign margin width was correlated to the patients' clinical course.

Results: Median safety margin width was revealed to be 1 mm. Nine of 126 patients (7.1%) developed recurrent disease (five local, four distant). All patients with local recurrence had safety margins ≤1 mm, whereas out of 49 patients with a margin >1 mm no one developed local recurrence (p=0.0245). Safety margin ≤1 mm showed associations with increased risk for overall recurrence in univariate and multivariate analysis (p=0.0531 and 0.0539, respectively).

Conclusion: Tumor adjacent renal parenchyma may have oncological relevance, corroborating the need for further molecular investigation of tumor-adjacent tissue in RCC.