Current guidelines from the American Urological Association and European Association of Urology recommend partial nephrectomy as the standard of care for the treatment of small renal masses. As an alternative to surgery, patients can be managed with a thermal ablative approach such as cryoablation or radiofrequency ablation (RFA). These technologies are typically reserved for patients unsuitable for surgery, such as those with multiple medical comorbidities. Partial nephrectomy is currently recommended above thermal ablation, owing to the paucity of data evaluating the relative efficacy of these two treatment approaches. Attempting to fill this void, Olweny and colleagues recently reported the results of a retrospective analysis comparing RFA to partial nephrectomy for the treatment of Tla renal cell carcinoma (RCC). According to the authors, this is only the second study to compare these modalities for the treatment of isolated tumours.
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