Nearly one in three patients with RCC develops distant metastatic disease. The most common site of distant metastasis is lung (75%), followed by bone (20%) and liver (18%) [6]. Metastasis of RCC to the head and neck region is relatively rare, with a reported incidence of 15% [7]. A literature review revealed 153 patients with renal carcinoma metastasizing to the oral cavity from 1970 to 2020 [5, 7–67] (Table 1). Male patients were more frequently affected (male to female ratio, 3.0:1), with ages ranging between 1 and 89 years (mean age, 61.4 years). The tongue was involved in renal metastases in most patients (62 patients, 39.5%). More than three-quarters of patients with oral metastasis from renal carcinoma also exhibited other metastatic lesions, primarily lung metastases (86 patients, 59.3%) (Table 1). Because of the high rate of lung metastases, the prognosis is reported to be very poor; most patients die within the first year after diagnosis [5],[27].
The literature review revealed that the oral metastasis was the first evidence of renal cancer in 58 patients. Ninety-three patients were diagnosed with oral metastatic lesions after primary renal cancer (Table 1). The information was not described for two patients. The duration from the onset of renal cancer to oral metastasis ranged from 2 weeks to 26 years, with an average of 4.8 years.
Oral metastatic lesions of renal cancer are known to undergo extremely rapid enlargement, which results in severe symptoms and a decline in quality of life. Dysphagia was observed in 17 patients [12],[20],[21],[25],[30]−[32],[37],[38],[41],[43],[45]−[47],[53],[56],[67] (Table 1). Obstruction of the upper airways due to rapid growth of oral metastasis led to tracheotomy in one patient [41] and death in one patient [38].
In addition, hemorrhage was observed in many patients because renal cancer is characterized by rich blood vessels. Twenty-seven patients exhibited bleeding [8, 10–14, 16, 17, 19, 21–24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 38, 39, 43, 48, 50, 55, 58, 61], which resulted in death in one case [58]. Ten patients reportedly had difficulty with hemostasis during biopsy or surgery[10, 22, 26, 38, 48, 52, 61, 63, 66] .Three patients underwent preoperative vascular embolization or ligation, which did not lead to complications during surgery [15, 19, 26]. Our experience with the present patient also indicated that preoperative vascular embolization is helpful in preventing massive hemorrhage during surgery for pulsatile oral metastasis of RCC.
Due to abundant arterial blood vessels, pulsation was observed in seven patients at the first visit [10, 15, 19, 20, 38]. Three of these patients exhibited pulsation in the maxillary bone [20] (Tables 1 and 2). In our patient, arteriovenous malformation was clinically suspected due to pulsation. Past reports indicated that two patients with mandibular lesions were also clinically diagnosed with vascular malformation, then diagnosed with RCC metastases upon pathological examination [14, 19]. When a pulsatile mass is present in a patient with a history of renal cancer, the possibility of renal cancer metastasis should be considered.
Histologically, an alveolar pattern of large clear cells is suggestive of RCC. Immunohistochemical examination plays a key role in differentiating other types of clear cell carcinoma, such as clear cell-rich salivary gland and clear cell odontogenic carcinoma, from metastatic RCC [39]. CD10 is a good marker to distinguish RCC from other clear cell-type carcinomas. The literature review showed that immunohistochemical staining of CD10 was performed for 31 patients, and positive expression was present in all patients. The positive expression of vimentin, pan cytokeratin (AE1/3), and epithelial membrane antigen are also suggestive of RCC. These were used for immunohistochemical staining of tissue from 27, 26, and 12 patients, respectively. The negative expression of cytokeratin 7 can often rule out salivary gland origin [39]. Immunohistochemical staining of cytokeratin 7 was performed in tissue from 17 patients, and negativity was confirmed in 14 patients.
Regarding treatments, surgery is often recommended due to the ability of metastatic RCC to resist radiotherapy and pharmacotherapy, including chemotherapy, molecularly targeted therapy, or immunotherapy [40]. However, oral metastasis of renal cancer has a poor prognosis, and hemostasis is difficult during surgery. Therefore, it is difficult for clinicians to judge whether surgery can improve quality of life for patients with end-stage cancer. Mazeron et al. described a patient with RCC metastasis to the tongue, who initially decided against surgery due to the poor prognosis. However, doctors were later forced to perform surgery because of a rapid increase in the size of the intraoral mass and resistance of the tumor to chemoradiotherapy [46]. Among 153 patients with oral metastasis of renal cancer described in the literature, the treatment and outcome of the oral lesion were described for 78. These data are summarized in Table 3. Surgery was performed in most patients (53 cases), and the local control rate was greater than 90%. In contrast, the local control rates of radiotherapy, pharmacotherapy, and palliative surgery (debulking and cryosurgery) ranged from 33.3–66.7%. Considering the high ratio of local control and increased quality of life after surgery, surgical therapy before further disease progression can occur may be the first choice for patients with oral metastasis of renal carcinoma.