Novel concepts in the staging of renal cell carcinoma

The incidence of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) continues to rise steadily; unfortunately, our ability to cure patients with metastatic RCC remains limited. When developing and evaluating new treatment protocols, it is important to consider the role of prognostic factors, often defined as pretreatment features, that are predictive of outcome. The complexity and variability of patients’ individual clinical outcome and the recently recognized limitation of conventional staging systems have lead to the formulation of integrated prognostic staging systems. In this review, we discuss the evolution of various clinically relevant integrated staging systems for RCC.