New Surgical Approach for Bladder Cancer

The findings were presented at the annual Update in Urology conference in Tampa (FL, USA) by Ralph deVere White, chair of the urology department at the University of California Davis Medical Center (Davis, USA).

The standard treatment for advanced bladder cancer is a radical cystectomy to remove the bladder, the lymph nodes and surrounding cancerous tissue. The new step-by-step approach, which has been offered to patients at the UC Davis Center for many years, calls for transurethral resection surgery to remove the bladder tumor, followed by additional surgeries to monitor cancer cell growth. Subsequent steps would depend on whether tissue samples test negative or positive for additional cancer. Adjuvant therapy is suggested to further improve survival. Cystectomy would remain an alternative..

Investigators at other institutions have also found that both approaches produce the same result. Dr. White believes the sequential approach could reduce the need for bladder removal by as much as 50%. "Based on these figures, we can save about half of the patients with invasive bladder cancer from a cystectomy and give them the same 10-year survival,” he noted.



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Univ of California Davis Medical Center