Many years ago it was thought that a prior laparoscopic hernia repair would be a major problem for a patient who had prostate cancer wanted a robotic prostatectomy.

Since 2003 the majority of robotic surgeons have performed robotic surgery through the abdominal cavity. With this approach, the bladder and blood vessels can safely be separated from the mesh with direct visualization.

I do not consider a prior hernia repair with mesh to be a significant concern prior to robotic surgery. The surgery should take a little longer, but removing the prostate is not a significant problem.

The only concern in patients that will undergo hernia repair is to make sure they do not have cancer at the present time. If they do and want surgery for prostate cancer, then a robotic hernia repair and robotic prostatectomy shoudl be done at the same time, avoiding 2 surgeries. I have performed over 100 of these combination hernia repairs and davinci prostatectomies.

I foudn an abstract about a way to manage urinary ascites that can rarely happen after dvP.

Conventional measures, including catheter traction, passive drainage, and needle vented Foley catheter suction, failed. On postoperative day 6 a unilateral nephroureteral stent was placed on intermittent suction.

Placement of one nephroureteral stent on suction device immediately stopped the urinary anastomotic leakage into the peritoneal cavity.

In case of a persistent urinary leak after RALP that fails conservative management, a nephroureteral stent on suction may aid to stop the anastomotic leak.

I have seen this problem a few times in the past 5 years. The best way to manage it, in my opinion, is to place a drain laparoscopically by the surgeon if one does not exist. I found that interventional radiology does not place as large a drain or in as good a place.

While I am placing the drain laparascopically, I also perform a cystoscopy to attempt to place 5 fr ureteral catheters for urinary diversion. I think the most important thing is to push the foleyin away from the bladder neck. I think foley traction on the anastamosis is what keeps the opening open.

A higher hospital radical cystectomy volume appears to lead to a lower risk of complications only after other common urological oncological procedures, namely radical prostatectomy and nephrectomy, but not after nononcological urology procedures.

This abstract found that hospitals that performed radical cystectomy (removal of the bladder and surrounding tissue for bladder cancer) had less complcations for kidney and prostate cancer surgery as well.

I have been perfoming radical cystecomies my whole career and started perfoming these robotically 3 1/2 years ago. Although I thought performing the more complex surgery helpe me in other surgeries, I didnt realize that a study would show less complications for these other procedures.

Patients with seminal vesicle positive disease who received adjuvant radiation compared to observation realized an improvement in 10-year biochemical failure-free survival from 12% to 36% (p = 0.001), in 10-year overall survival from 51% to 71% (p = 0.08) and in metastasis-free survival from 47% to 66% (p = 0.09), respectively.

Although seminal vesicle involvement is a negative prognostic factor, long-term control is possible especially if patients are given adjuvant radiation therapy. This therapy appears to be effective in patients with seminal vesicle involvement.

This one study showed an advantage of giving patients radiation if they had cancer in the seminal vesicles at the time of radical prostatectomy. Many factors need to be addressed in determining if radiation is necessary after surgery.

Source: Urotoday

While a microfocus of Gleason score 6 prostate cancer on biopsy is commonly considered low risk disease, there was a greater than 1/5 risk of pathological upgrading and/or up staging. Patients with Gleason score 6 microfocal prostate cancer should be counseled that they may harbor more aggressive disease, especially when pretreatment clinical risk factors are present, such as advanced age or high clinical prostate specific antigen density.

The team at the University of Chicago looked at patients with only 1 small focus of cancer that was the lower grade (6) on biopsy. Overall 42 patients (22%) had adverse pathological outcomes, including upgrading in 35 [higher gleason score] (18%) and upstaging [cancer outside the prostate] in 16 (8%). I performed a similar study almost 2 years ago that also found the amount and type of cancer is underestimated on biopsy.

This study looked at 875 patients with locally advanced prostate cancer (T3; 78%; PSA<70; N0; M0) without evidence of distant spread. These men were from multiple centers in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. In this set of patients, adding radiation helped men live longer compared to hormonal therapy alone.

The only difference in my practice, and in many centers in the US is that we sometimes perform surgery for these patients as well. The other difference is that these patients were given continuous endocrine treatment using flutamide, which is not as effective as other hormonal therapy regimens that we usually use (gonadotropin-releasing hormone ( GnRH) agonists).

"It is now 100% official, high-doses (400 IU or more per day) of vitamin E supplements should not be taken by anyone, especially men trying to prevent, those diagnosed, or even treated for prostate cancer (in other words all men on planet earth)!!!"

Dr. Moyad is in my opinion, the most respected and knowledgeable authority on nutritional support and supplements for prostate cancer. He comments on how the use of high dose Vitamin E is not only beneficial, but likely harmful.

• After multivariate analysis there was no significance with sacrificing an APA and time of potency recovery. There was no correlation with sacrificing an APA and postoperative quality of erections (94% vs 90% p=0.30) or mean IIEF-5 (22.4 vs 20.7 p=0.11).




• As one of the few reports regarding anomalous venous anatomy during robotic prostatectomy, this study found no correlation between APAs and preoperative potency. Additionally the authors found no correlation between sacrificing APAs and 24-month potency return. The authors concluded that they found no effect on the time to return of potency, quality of erections or mean IIEF-5 scores at 24 months.

This is the first study that I have seen that addresses return of sexual function in men with accessory pudendal arteries. This is an extra artery that brings blood to the genital area that travels very close to the prostate and through the DVC (vein that brings blood back from the penis).

I usually try saving these arteries and usually I am successful, but it is good to know it is not a big deal to transect it if necessary.

Conclusion

Urological surgeons should be encouraged to perform a thorough inguinal exam during preoperative evaluation and intraoperatively to detect subclinical hernias. Inguinal herniorrhaphy done concurrently at the time of RALP is safe, with no added morbidity and should be routinely performed.

This is a paper Dr. Ahlering and I wrote which is a review of our results and techniques of fixing hernias during dvP.

Since conferring with Dr Ahlering on this paper, I have changed my technique to resemble his more.

The main point of the article is that hernias are common and it is beneficial for patients to have them fixed.

Conclusions

We report a large, multi-institutional series of RPN for renal tumors, confirming safety and feasibility reported in previous small, single-institution studies. Although we report the initial experience in RPN at each center, immediate oncologic results and perioperative outcomes approached those of more mature laparoscopic series. Robotic assistance may facilitate the technical challenges of precise tumor resection and renal reconstruction within acceptable warm ischemia times. Long-term outcomes are needed to establish the role of RPN in nephron-sparing surgery.

This was a large multi-institutional study that I was part of. This was the largest robotic partial nephrectomy study reported.

The average age of the patients was 62.9 years. Average total PSA before and after treatment was 6.05 ng/ml and 5.55 ng/ml, respectively. On biopsy, 23% of patients had histologically proven prostate cancer. There were no significant differences between men with and without prostate cancer in age, pretreatment PSA, free PSA, percent free PSA, and PSA density.

Average total PSA, free PSA, and PSA density decreased after treatment in men with and without prostate cancer. But the reductions in total PSA and PSA density were not significant in prostate cancer patients and the reduction in free PSA in cancer-free patients was not significant.

This paper looked at treating patients with an elevated PSA and a normal rectal exam with antibiotics. The reason why this is important is that many urologists prescribe antibiotics for men with elevated PSA values and only biopsy them if the PSA is still elevated.

This study did not show a significant difference for men with and without prostate cancer for PSA changes. Both groups had a decline in PSA values.

This is not a conclusive study and the use of antibiotics is still an option in treating men with a high PSA. I personally like to start with a biopsy and not antibiotics in men that have never had a prostate biopsy.

The mean total operative time (140 vs 156 minutes, P = .04), warm ischemia time (19 vs 25 minutes, P = .03), and length of stay (2.5 vs 2.9 days, P = .03) were significantly shorter for RPN than for LPN, respectively.

RPN can produce results comparable to LPN but has disadvantages, such as cost and assistant control of the renal hilum. Additional randomized trials are needed.

A friend and expert robotic renal surgeon, Dr Bhayani, discusses his results with robotic partial nephrectomy.

The most important finding is the improvement in warm ischemia time, the amount of time the kidney is not receiving blood supply.

Another important finding is that the operation can be done quicker robotically, which can translate into a cost savings that will partially offset the increased cost of the robotic equipment.

Selenium and vitamin E supplements, taken either alone or together, do not appear to prevent prostate cancer, according to an initial, independent review of study data from the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT).

The data also showed two concerning trends: a small but not statistically significant increase in the number of prostate cancer cases among the more than 35,000 men age 50 years and older in the trial taking only vitamin E; and a small, but not statistically significant increase in the number of cases of adult-onset diabetes in men taking only selenium.

Because this is an early analysis of the data from the study, neither of these findings proves an increased risk from the supplements, and both may be due to chance, according to the authors.

This was a well recruited study that started many years ago when I was at Indiana. We were one of the sites that were recruiting patients. This is the first analysis I have seen from this, so we will need to wait for more data to come out. According to early findings, neither Vitamin E nor selenium help prevent prostate cancer.

Proton radiation for early prostate cancer had an acceptable tolerability profile but produced little evidence of a "gee whiz" impact to support its cost, according to preliminary results from a phase I/II clinical trial.

Two-thirds of patients had acute genitourinary or gastrointestinal toxicity, and a third had late GU/GI toxicity, Anthony Zietman, M.D., of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, reported at the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology meeting.

Although most of the toxicity was grade 2 in severity, the overall profile provided little reason for enthusiasm.

"The bottom line is that the treatment was safe, it was reasonably well tolerated, but probably no better tolerated than any other form of radiation that we give," Dr. Zietman said.

According to this study, the less available and much more expensive proton radiation therapy for prostate cancer is not much different than traditional radiation.

The trial planned to enroll 200 patients, but an interim analysis at 107 patients met criteria for futility and the trial was closed. For patients completing the protocol to 2 yr, potency was recovered in 32 of 45 (71%) of SNG and 14 of 21 (67%) of controls (p=0.777). By intent-to-treat analysis, potency recovered in 32 of 66 (48.5%) of SNG and 14 of 41 (34%) of controls (p=0.271). No differences were seen in time to potency or quality of life scores for ED and urinary function. Limitations included slower-than-expected accrual and poor compliance with ED therapy: < 65% for VED and < 40% for injections.

The addition of SNG to a UNS RP did not improve potency at 2 yr following surgery.

This study was comparing men who were going nerve sparing prostatectomy on one side and adding a nerve graft on the other side. Nerve grafting takes more time and has some side effects depending on which nerve you use. This study, like many before it, did not find a benefit in performing a nerve graft.

I've always felt that this wwould be the case since the neurovascualr bundle is a series of small microscopic nerves, not a large nerve that you can see.