Kidney Cancer Patients May Have Higher Survival Rates When Only Tumor Is Removed.

HealthDay  (4/18, Preidt) reports, "Kidney cancer patients who have only the tumor removed, not the entire kidney, have higher survival rates," according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Investigators looked at data on "more than 7,000 Medicare patients with early-stage kidney cancer who underwent surgery to remove either the entire organ (radical nephrectomy) or only the tumor and a small margin of healthy tissue around it (partial nephrectomy)." The researchers found that "after an average follow-up of five years, 25 percent of patients who had a partial nephrectomy had died, compared with 42 percent of those who had a radical nephrectomy."