Cancer Assist Podcast — Kidney Cancer from Diagnosis to Treatment

On the most recent episode of the Cancer Assist Podcast, host Dr. Bill Evans sits down with Dr. Aly-Khan Lalani, an Assistant Professor of Oncology at McMaster University who recently earned the Canadian Association of Medical Oncologists’s 2023 Rising Star Award. Together, they discuss risk factors, symptoms, and treatment options for kidney cancer, also known as renal cell carcinoma.

According to Dr. Lalani, due to the location of the kidneys, kidney cancer can go undetected until it’s caught through routine imaging. But before we talk about diagnosis and treatment, it’s important to know exactly what kidneys do.

Our kidneys filter blood, removing waste and extra water to make urine. However, Dr. Lalani says they perform many other important activities, too.?

A “kidney has other important functions like how it metabolizes certain drugs, how it regulates our so-called homeostasis or water levels and salt levels in our body, and then helps create factors like erythropoietin to help with hemoglobin. So, it's quite obviously a vital organ,” he says.?

Kidney cancer is “slightly more predominant in men than women, with a median age of diagnosis somewhere in the 60-65 range,” says Dr. Lalani, who specializes in the treatment of genitourinary malignancies and sarcomas. He says that risk factors for kidney cancer include age, smoking, and high blood pressure or BMI.?

"We see a lot of patients who have had a prior kidney surgery, or, for whatever reason, they inherited or were born without a functioning kidney,” says Dr. Lalani. “When the other kidney has a cancer, it’s quite technical expertise you need to manage and look after the patient.”?

Treatment for kidney cancer can include surgery and immunotherapy, says Dr. Lalani, who is excited about new data, studies, and therapies that will likely benefit cancer patients in the near future. To hear more, listen to Dr. Lalani’s conversation on our website or find it on Apple, Google, Spotify and Youtube.