• The disease
• Diagnosis
• Treatments

Symptoms

Signs and symptoms of kidney cancer can include:

• blood in your urine
• a constant pain in your side, just below the ribs
• lump or swelling in the kidney area (on either side of the body)

See your GP as soon as possible if you experience any of these symptoms.

In around half of all cases of kidney cancer there are no symptoms, and the condition is detected during tests for other unrelated conditions.

Risk factors

Cigarette smoking, obesity and hypertension are well-known risk factors. RCC also appears to be more common in patients on dialysis.

Approximately 2%–3% of all RCCs are hereditary and several autosomal dominant syndromes are described, each with a distinct genetic basis and phenotype.

Incidence

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) represents 2-3% of all cancers , with the highest incidence occurring in Western countries.

Generally, during the last two decades until recently, there has been an annual increase of about 2% in incidence both worldwide and in Europe, though in Denmark and Sweden a continuing decrease has been observed³ .

In 2012, there were approximately 84,400 new cases of RCC and 34,700 kidney cancer related deaths within the European Union4.

In Europe, overall mortality rates for RCC have increased up until the early 1990s, with rates generally stabilizing or declining thereafter. There has been a decrease in mortality since the 1980s in Scandinavian countries and since the early 1990s in France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy. However, in some European countries (Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Slovakia), mortality rates still show an upward trend with increasing rates⁵ .