Award-winning research highlights opportunities for kidney cancer screening

Congratulations to UM member Dr Sabrina H Rossi, who received the Best Abstract Presentation Award in her session at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress 2026 in London.

Sabrina presented research examining the prevalence of kidney cancer in people attending lung cancer screening and combined lung and abdominal screening. As targeted lung cancer screening continues to roll out across the UK, understanding how many kidney cancers are detected in this high-risk population is becoming increasingly important for future healthcare planning.

Her research used data from the Yorkshire Kidney Screening Trial (YKST), which is evaluating the feasibility of adding a non-contrast abdominal CT scan to the low-dose thoracic CT used in the Yorkshire Lung Screening Trial (YLST). Across two rounds of thoracic CT screening in YLST kidney cancer was detected in 17 of 6,650 participants (0.26%). When an abdominal CT scan was added in YKST, researchers identified 10 additional histologically confirmed kidney cancers among 4,019 participants that would not have been detected through lung cancer screening alone.

These findings provide important evidence to inform future large-scale screening trials and suggest that the national expansion of targeted lung cancer screening may increase demand for kidney cancer diagnostic and treatment services.

Sabrina would like to thank the research teams involved in YKST and YLST, as well as all the patients who took part in the studies. Their contribution has been essential in advancing research into earlier cancer detection.

Read the full study: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euo.2025.07.004