Smoking Cessation After Diagnosis of Kidney Cancer Is Associated With Reduced Risk of Mortality and Cancer Progression: A Prospective Cohort Study.

Purpose: To investigate whether postdiagnosis smoking cessation may affect the risk of death and disease progression in patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) who smoked at the time of diagnosis.

Methods: Two hundred twelve patients with primary RCC were recruited between 2007 and 2016 from the Urological Department in N.N. Blokhin National Medical Research Center of Oncology, Moscow, Russia. Upon enrollment, a structured questionnaire was completed, and the patients were followed annually through 2020 to repeatedly assess their smoking status and disease progression. Survival probabilities and hazards for all-cause and cancer-specific mortality and disease progression were investigated using extended the Kaplan-Meier method, time-dependent Cox proportional hazards regression, and Fine-Gray competing-risk models.

Results: Patients were followed for a median of 8.2 years. During this time, 110 cases of disease progression, 100 total deaths, and 77 cancer-specific deaths were recorded. Eighty-four patients (40%) quit smoking after diagnosis. The total person-years at risk for this analysis were 748.2 for continuing smoking and 611.2 for quitting smoking periods. At 5 years of follow-up, both overall survival (85% 61%) and progression-free survival (80% 57%) rates were higher during the quitting than continuing smoking periods (both < .001). In the multivariable time-dependent models, quitting smoking was associated with lower risk of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio [HR], 0.51; 95% CI, 0.31 to 0.85), disease progression (HR, 0.45; 95% CI, 0.29 to 0.71), and cancer-specific mortality (HR, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.31 to 0.93). The beneficial effect of quitting smoking was evident across all subgroups, including light smokers versus moderate-heavy smokers and those with early-stage versus late-stage tumors.

Conclusion: Quitting smoking after RCC diagnosis may significantly improve survival and reduce the risk of disease progression and cancer mortality among patients who smoke.