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This is fanatics thanks! The inflammation from tumor removal causing cancer cells to awaken is very interesting. I had a partial nephrectomy, so hypothetically my chances of reoccurrence is slightly higher since I had my tumor removed? But of course we couldn’t leave it in either. Is the staging have anything to do with how likely they are to wake up?

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It's probably not meaningfully higher - this discovery was made a long time ago, and since then we've had a lot of research into which tumors it's really relevant to, and those tumors now get anti-inflammatory medication as a standard part of treatment to prevent just that from happening.

The staging is just ("just") a reflection of the primary cancer mass, which is really predictive of outcomes. It's generally not directly related to whether these sorts of satellite tumors form, since the above advances. It's mostly at this point a historical point of "this is part of how we figured out how cancer works," and ties into the rationale for some of the now-standard treatments.

Much appreciated, thanks so much

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