Floating heart metastasis

Renal-cell carcinoma accounts for 2 percent of all cancers and a third of the patients who undergo resection of localized disease will have a recurrence. We report a case of a 58-year-old man with a right atrial mass protruding into right ventricle arising from the inferior vena cava, found by echocardiography, which was subsequently proved to be a recurrence of renal-cell carcinoma 25 years after radical left nephrectomy. This pattern of late recurrence is rare and suggests that this tumor's aggressive nature contributed to the degree of heart invasion and the patient's rapid death. © 2006 American Society of Echocardiography.