In the last couple of decades, as internal imaging has gotten better and more common, doctors have been finding more instances of kidney tumors, such as the one Gov. Phil Murphy announced this weekend that he has.
But there's good news.
"A lot of kidney masses we find are nonaggressive and really aren't destined to get people into trouble," Alexander Kutikov, chief of the division of urologic oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center, said Sunday. "There's a really wide spectrum of disease severity in kidney cancer."
The governor announced Saturday that doctors plan to remove the tumor on his left kidney in early March and that his prognosis is "very good." The tumor was found during an intestinal test. It was unclear whether it is cancerous.
Roughly 400,000 people in the United States are living with a kidney cancer diagnosis. Roughly 20% to 30% of the kidney tumors that surgeons remove are benign, Kutikov said.
Many kidney tumors, especially when they are small, are detected by routine screening for something else. Murphy's tumor is about 3 centimeters wide, which makes all the difference, said Kutikov and Naomi Haas, a doctor and director of the kidney and prostate cancer clinical program at Penn's Abramson Cancer Center.
"Generally, most masses of that size have a very low risk of spreading," she said Sunday.
When a kidney tumor is that size, doctors can monitor it over years or decades to see whether it grows, or they can remove it. It's a decision that patients with small tumors make in consultation with their doctors, based, for example, on their risk factors. Tobacco exposure and obesity can raise a person's risk for kidney cancer, as well as having several relatives who have had the disease. Murphy has said his family has no known history of cancer.
Most kidney surgeries are minimally invasive and require small incisions. The governor could be back to work in two to four weeks, depending on how the surgery goes, Haas said. Most patients in the governor's situation don't need additional treatment because the risk of tumors returning is low, she said.
She said she's "grateful" to Murphy for talking publicly about his tumor.
"Whenever somebody speaks out about a diagnosis," she said, "it's bringing awareness."
