Abstract
Background: The incidence of kidney cancer is high in Western Europe, Northern Europe and North America, while it is low in Asia. Although the incidence of kidney cancer in Japan is lower than the rates in the other industrialized countries, there is no doubt that it is increasing. In this paper, we would like to introduce the result of epidemiological studies, which evaluate the non-genetic risk factors for kidney cancer in the Japanese population. Methods: Relevant studies were identified in the PubMed database using the combination of “Japan”, “kidney cancer”, “renal cell cancer” and “risk”, and the ICHUSHI database (Japanese database) using a combination of “kidney cancer /renal cell cancer”, and “risk factor”. In addition, we selected one cohort study from the references of these reports. Results and Discussion: Several studies were identified in the database. In these studies, obesity, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, kidney diseases, chronic renal disease with dialysis, tobacco smoke, fondness for fatty food, milk, and black tea are associated with an increased risk of kidney cancer. On the other hand, an inverse association with the kidney cancer risk is found for an intake of starchy roots (i.e., taro, sweet potato and potato), physical activity and educational level. In Japan, however, drinking black tea and milk may be surrogates for a westernized dietary habit while eating starchy roots may be a surrogate for a traditional Japanese dietary habit. Additional studies are needed to confirm the risk factors for kidney cancer in the Japanese population.
Highlights
Renal cell cancer, which arises from the cells of the proximal convoluted renal tubules [1,2], accounts for 2-3% of all malignancies in western countries [2,3] and 1-2% in Japan [3,4]
The incidence of kidney cancer is high in Western Europe, Northern Europe, and North America while it is low in Asia [1,2]
We introduced six studies which evaluated the risk of kidney cancer for the Japanese population
Summary
Renal cell cancer, which arises from the cells of the proximal convoluted renal tubules [1,2], accounts for 2-3% of all malignancies in western countries [2,3] and 1-2% in Japan [3,4]. We would like to introduce the result of these studies on the risk factors for kidney cancer in the Japanese population [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Seven reports [5,6,7,8,9,10,14] were the findings from three large population based cohort studies in Japan [13,14,15]. The JACC Study, a large population-based cohort study in Japan, is a large-scale prospective study involving. In the JPHC Study, Inoue et al [9] evaluated the risk of kidney cancer including renal cell carcinoma and renal pelvis/ureter cancer in a Japanese population. The final study is the summary of annual nation-wide questionnaire studies from 1982 to 2004 conducted by the Japanese Society for Dialysis Therapy [13]
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