Cytogenetic studies of renal cell carcinoma.

To examine the possibility that patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) have chromosomal abnormalities at a common gene locus, we undertook a study of patients with and without a history of hereditary disease as part of an ongoing population-based case-control study of risk factors in RCC. We identified 112 patients for cytogenetic study. Chromosome preparations were made from peripheral blood cultures with standard and giemsa (GTG) banding techniques. C-banding was used to determine C-polymorphism. Eighty-nine cases had completely normal male and female karyotypes. Twenty-seven of them had C-polymorphism. In 16 patients, random numerical and structural abnormalities were observed. In the remaining seven patients, four had mosaic karyotypes, and the other three showed structural abnormalities. There was no statistically significant difference in the frequency of the abnormal karyotypes between the hereditary and nonhereditary RCC patients. This concludes a negative cytogenetic study of RCC patients that failed to show any constitutional rearrangement in blood cells.