Renal cell carcinoma in children and adolescents: Single-center experience and literature review.

Abstract

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is infrequent in the pediatric population. In addition, till date, only a few reports have summarized the characteristics of pediatric RCC and differences between pediatric and adult RCC. Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate the clinical characteristics of RCC in children and adolescents, and identify the differences between children and adolescent patients and adult patients through literature retrieval.The data of 13 pediatric patients diagnosed with RCC at the Children's Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine between 2005 and 2019 were retrospectively analyzed.Three patients were aged <5 years, 2 were aged 6 to 10 years, and 8 were aged 11 to 18 years. Among the 13 patients, common clinical manifestations included abdominal pain in 5 patients, gross hematuria in 4, and an abdominal mass in 1, while the other 3 patients were incidentally detected after an abdominal contusion. The pathological types were microphthalmia family translocation RCC in 9 patients, clear-cell RCC in 2, papillary RCC in 1, and unclassified in 1. All the children underwent radical nephrectomy, including 2 patients with advanced disease who underwent preoperative transcatheter arterial chemoembolization. The mean follow-up time was 58.6 months. Two patients died after 4 and 17 months of follow-up, respectively.In conclusion, microphthalmia family translocation renal cell carcinoma is the predominant type of pediatric RCC associated with advanced tumor stage. The early diagnosis and treatment of pediatric patients is important for improving prognosis. Nevertheless, future studies are urgently needed to determine the treatment for pediatric advanced RCC to increase the survival rate.