Recovery of paraneoplastic hypercalcemia by sunitinib treatment for renal cell carcinoma: a case report and review of the literature

Abstract

Sunitinib is a novel oral multitargeted tyrosine kinase inhibitor. It has higher response rates and progression-free survival in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC) when compared with standard chemotherapy and interferon-alpha. We report a case of paraneoplastic hypercalcemia, resistant to conventional treatment but recovers by sunitinib treatment as the first case in the literature, in a 33-years-old man with metastatic RCC. At the sixth month of follow-up period, in this case, serum calcium level was still in normal ranges. Besides sunitinib is effective in symptom control, it is also helpful in management of paraneoplastic hypercalcemia, a life-threatening entity.