A 46-year-old man noticed pale red blood in his urine on and off for two weeks. A CT scan found a small nodule bulging from the top of his right kidney, and doctors suspected renal cell carcinoma, which accounts for about 9 in 10 kidney cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. Surgeons removed it along with a margin of kidney. The lab found no cancer at all, just adrenal gland tissue growing where it did not belong.
The case was published February 19, 2026, in Frontiers in Oncology by Shuxin Li, Yongliang Qu, Yongshuai Huang and Si Liu of the First Hospital of Jilin University in Changchun and Jinzhou Medical University in China. A second twist made the case unusual: the tissue did not appear to explain the blood in his urine.
