Renal medullary carcinoma (RMC) has been reported in only a few hundred cases in urologic literature, and there is a deficit of information on its pathophysiology and optimal treatment techniques. While RMC is found in individuals of all ethnicities, it predominantly affects Black patients.
Researchers utilized the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program database 18 registries to determine the predictors of mortality and overall survival (OS) outcomes in patients with RMC.
Demographic and clinical data were collected on patients with RMC between 1996 and 2018. A multivariate analysis was used to determine predictors of mortality, and Kaplan-Meier survival curves were developed to display the differences in OS of Black patients versus non-Black patients diagnosed with RMC during the study period.
A total of 100 patients diagnosed with RMC were identified through the SEER-18 database. Most of the patients included in the study were Black (83%), and 17% identified as White. The mean age was 28.0 ± 12.0 years (95% CI, 25.7-30.4), and 76% of the patients were male. The mean survival was 13.8 ± 3.0 months (95% CI, 7.9-19.7).
Most of the patients (70%) presented with distant metastatic disease at time of diagnosis. Black patients with RMC were less likely to receive surgery and 5 times more likely than White patients to die due to disease (odds ratio, 5.4; 95% CI, 1.09-26.9; P=.04).
Black patients had a lower survival rate at 12 months compared with White patients, and they experienced a sharp decline in survival to 10.2% at 24 months (P<.05) and 7.6% at 48 months (P<.05) following a diagnosis of RMC.
These data confirm that RMC is a rare malignancy that disproportionately affects Black patients. Further investigation is needed to determine the etiology of outcomes seen in that patient population.
