Seeking out a second opinion can give you the confidence that you’re getting the best treatment available — something that can be especially important for people who have fewer resources for cancer care.
Some Groups Have Discrepancies in Care
There’s some evidence that racial or socioeconomic factors play a role in treatment decisions and outcomes. Black patients, for example, tend to have lower survival rates than non-Hispanic white patients, with some research showing that Black patients are offered less aggressive surgical or medical treatments for RCC. Other research suggests that socioeconomic factors like income, insurance status, and access to care play a role in the discrepancy.
There May Be More Than One Right Treatment
Since renal cell carcinoma can be treated in a variety of ways, it may be worth seeing if you prefer one doctor’s recommendations over another. “Different providers may have alternate approaches in treating the same disease,” says Farshid Sadeghi, MD, a urologic oncology surgeon and the chief of surgery at City of Hope Cancer Center in Phoenix, Arizona.
- Immunotherapy This includes monoclonal antibodies and immune checkpoint inhibitors such as pembrolizumab (Keytruda).
- Targeted Therapies Therapies like tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are designed to target specific proteins that help cancer grow.
- Surgery These procedures remove the affected kidney.
- External Beam Radiotherapy This is a type of radiation treatment.
- Chemotherapy Medication given through an IV eliminates cancer cells.
There Are Newer Treatment Options Available
“The treatment landscape of advanced RCC has dramatically changed in the past decade,” says Anthony Gulati, MD, a hematologist-oncologist with Stamford Health in Connecticut. While TKI medications have been the standard of care for renal cell carcinoma, the landscape has evolved with the development of newer TKI agents and also immunotherapies, says Dr. Gulati.
Current guidelines recommend combination treatments like a TKI plus immunotherapy or two types of immunotherapy.
The nuance of which treatment combination to use in which scenario depends on your symptoms, cancer stage, and biomarkers — tiny biological clues found in blood or tissue tests, says Gulati.
There Are Advanced Surgical Techniques Available
It’s important to take into consideration how much experience a surgeon has with this procedure, as well as the reasons why they’re advocating for the surgery, says Sadeghi.
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