Study: Robotic RP offers low cancer recurrence rate

Nearly 87% of patients who underwent robot-assisted radical prostatectomy had no disease recurrence after 5 years, according to a recent multicenter study.

Mani Menon, MD, of Henry Ford Hospital’s Vattikuti Urology Institute, Detroit, and co-authors studied 1,384 men (mean age, 60 years) with moderately aggressive prostate cancer who underwent robot-assisted radical prostatectomy between September 2001 and May 2005.

The patients were checked for recurrence every 3 months during the first year after surgery, twice during the second year, then annually. A median follow-up of 5 years was used for the study.

The fact that deaths from prostate cancer occurred in only one of 1,000 patients per year of follow-up should provide a strong endorsement of the curative role of radical prostatectomy for patients with localized disease treated in the contemporary era, say the authors.

"With 5-year actuarial biochemical recurrence-free survival outcomes of 86.6%, robot-assisted radical prostatectomy appears to confer effective 5-year prostate cancer control," the authors wrote.

Results from the study were published online in European Urology (2010; 58:e53-e62).