DETROIT Robot-assisted surgery has replaced another minimally invasive operation as the main procedure to treat kidney cancer while sparing part of the diseased organ, and with comparable results, according to a new research study by Henry Ford Hospital urologists.
While the study shows that robot-assisted partial nephrectomy (RAPD), available only since 2004, may also offer fewer complications than laparoscopic partial nephrectomy (LPN), the researchers cautioned that available data did not allow them to consider such factors as surgical expertise and the complexity of each cancer.
"To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to compare complication rates after RAPN and LPN," says Quoc-Dien Trinh, M.D., a Fellow at Henry Ford Hospital's Vattikuti Urology Institute and lead author of the study.
The findings will be presented at the American Urological Association's Annual Meeting, May 19 to 23, in Atlanta.
Partial nephrectomy or PN, involves surgically removing only the diseased part of a cancerous kidney, compared to the once-standard treatment radical nephrectomy or RN in which the entire kidney, part of the ureter, the adrenal gland, and some surrounding tissue are removed. The less extreme PN became possible with improvements in 3D scanning technology, and not only offers obvious advantages over RN, but earlier studies found it results in an overall drop in related cardiovascular complications and death.
In LPN, the surgeon removes the kidney tumor through a small incision rather than a wide opening less invasive but more technically challenging. The increasingly common use of surgical robots allows surgeons to operate with more precision in minimally invasive procedures.
Using the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), the Henry Ford Hospital researchers identified 1,174 patients who underwent minimally invasive PN from October 2008 to December 2009. Of those, 72.5 percent of the patients had
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| Contact: Krista Hopson khopson1@hfhs.org 313-874-7207 Henry Ford Health System Source:Eurekalert |