Age and Gender Could Factor into Advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma Outcomes

Many factors impact outcomes in patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma, but recent findings suggest a patient’s age and gender are perhaps more important than previously realized.

In an interview with CURE®’s sister publication, OncLive®, McKay, who is an assistant professor of medicine and medical oncologist at the University of California, San Diego, explained how the biologic differences in the genetic profiles of men and women could impact the efficacy of certain treatments, and touched on how the toxicities that some patients experience could vary between younger and older patients.

Transcription:

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that age and gender play a role in cancer outcomes, and there are multiple factors for this.

They could be biologic, (with) different genetic profiles for men and women and younger and elderly individuals. There's different chemical kinetics, for example, how we process different drugs may be processed differently in men versus women and also based on different ethnicities and presence of different enzymes that help with drug metabolism. We (also) know that toxicity patterns are different between younger and older individuals and male and female patients.