What Dwyane Wade's Story Can Teach Us About Kidney Cancer

A symptom he almost ignored

Dwyane Wade played 16 seasons in the NBA and is in the Basketball Hall of Fame. In January 2025 he talked on his own podcast about a health scare he had kept quiet for a year.

ABC News reported what he said. Wade went to a doctor because his urine stream had changed. It was slow. It was weak. That was the whole complaint.

The visit led to a full-body scan. The scan showed something on his kidney. Doctors told him it could be a cyst or a tumor. He sought more than one opinion, then had surgery on December 18, 2023. About 40% of his right kidney came out with the growth. The tumor was cancerous.

Taking out part of a kidney rather than the whole organ is called a partial nephrectomy. Wade did not make public what type of kidney cancer he had, what stage it was, or what his follow-up looks like. So this page says nothing about any of that.

Where kidney cancer begins

You have two kidneys, one on each side of the spine, above the waist. Inside each one are millions of tiny tubes called tubules. They filter the blood, pull out waste, and make urine. The urine drains down a tube called a ureter into the bladder.

The National Cancer Institute explains that renal cell cancer starts in the lining of those tubules. It is also called renal cell adenocarcinoma. It is the most common kidney cancer in adults.

That matters because "kidney cancer" is not one disease. NCI's clinical summary notes that renal cell cancer behaves differently from cancers that start in the drainage system of the kidney, and differently again from Wilms tumor, which mostly affects young children.

Why so many are found by accident

Here is the odd thing about kidney tumors. A kidney can grow a sizeable tumor and cause almost no trouble, because the other kidney keeps working.

NCI lists the classic signs as blood in the urine and a lump in the abdomen. Both of those tend to show up late. So a large share of kidney cancers today are picked up on a scan ordered for something else entirely — a fall, a stomach complaint, a check on something unrelated. Doctors call these incidental findings.

Wade's case fits that pattern. The complaint that got him through the door was not the tumor talking.

When to get checked

None of the following means cancer. Each one means a doctor should take a look and sort it out.

• Blood you can see in the urine, even once, even without pain, even if it clears on its own.
• A lump or firm swelling in the side or belly that you can feel.
• A dull ache in the flank or lower back that does not settle over several weeks.
• Weight coming off without you trying, or fevers with no infection to explain them.
• A change in urination that lasts, such as a stream that stays weak.

Most of these turn out to be something ordinary. Stones. Infection. In men, an enlarged prostate. Finding that out takes a urine test, a scan, and a conversation. Our guide to cancer symptoms covers how to raise this kind of thing without downplaying it.

There is no routine screening test for kidney cancer in people at average risk. NCI names cigarette smoking and misuse of certain pain medicines among the things that affect risk, and some inherited conditions raise it too.

What treatment involves

Surgery is the backbone of treatment for kidney cancer that has not spread. NCI describes two main operations.

A partial nephrectomy removes the tumor and a rim of tissue around it, leaving the rest of the kidney in place. A radical nephrectomy removes the whole kidney, and sometimes nearby tissue and lymph nodes.

Which one is used depends mostly on the size and position of the tumor, and on how well the kidneys are working. Keeping kidney tissue matters over a lifetime, so surgeons save it where they safely can. Some small tumors are instead frozen or heated through a needle, and some are watched closely rather than treated straight away. Our page on surgery for cancer explains what recovery from an operation like this usually involves.

When kidney cancer has spread, treatment shifts to drugs — targeted therapy aimed at the blood supply the tumor depends on, immunotherapy, or the two together.

What the numbers say about the group

SEER, the federal cancer surveillance program, reprints an American Cancer Society forecast of about 80,450 new kidney and renal pelvis cancers in the United States in 2026, and about 15,160 deaths. The median age at diagnosis is 65.

Two-thirds of cases — 66% — are found while still confined to the kidney. Five-year relative survival is 93.6% for those. It is 77.6% when the cancer has reached nearby lymph nodes, and 20.3% once it has spread to distant organs. Across all stages it is 79.2%.

Those figures describe tens of thousands of people diagnosed years ago. They are a group average. They cannot tell any one person what will happen, and they are not a forecast for anyone reading this.

What this does not mean

Wade's scan found a tumor. That does not make full-body scans a good idea for healthy people. Scans of people without symptoms turn up a great many findings that never would have caused harm, and each one leads to more tests. What worked here was the ordinary chain: a symptom, a doctor, a targeted look.

His outcome also says nothing about anyone else's. He has not shared a stage or a tumor type, and without those the comparison has no footing.

And "40% of a kidney removed" is a fact about one operation, not a standard. The amount taken depends entirely on where a tumor sits.

Sources

• ABC News: Dwyane Wade shares he had a cancerous tumor removed from his kidney
• NCI PDQ: Renal Cell Cancer Treatment (Patient Version)
• NCI PDQ: Renal Cell Cancer Treatment (Health Professional Version)
• NCI SEER Cancer Stat Facts: Kidney and Renal Pelvis Cancer

How this article was prepared

An AI-assisted editorial system helped prepare this page. No named medical reviewer has reviewed it unless one is listed.

Cancer Explained is published by the National Cancer Information Foundation. It is not medical advice and does not suggest a test or treatment.

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