Management of clinical T1 bladder transitional cell carcinoma by radical cystectomy

High-grade bladder cancer involving the lamina propria is considered superficial disease. This spectrum is generally treated with TUR plus intravesical therapy. However, significant understaging jeopardizes long-term survival and improvements and radical surgery represents a provocative alternative. We evaluated disease-free and cancer-specific survival (CSS) in our cohort of patients with high-grade T1 tumors. A total of 318 patients with bladder cancer underwent radical cystectomy between 1990 and 2000 at our institution. Of these, 66 had cT1 tumors with or without Carcinoma in-situ (CIS). Our multidisciplinary bladder cancer database was queried to perform a multivariate analysis on clinical parameters such as: age, race, sex, cystectomy year, intravesical therapy, angiolymphatic-invasion and tumor upstage in relation to recurrence and survival. The clinical stage was accurate in 44 of the cases (66%). However, 27% were upstaged by cystectomy and 12% of the cT1 + CIS patients had nodal disease. Patients with cT1 tumors plus CIS had a significantly worse CSS. Those with persistent disease after an initial course of BCG therapy appeared to have worse CSS also. At a median follow up of 4 years, overall cancer-specific mortality was 22%, however, pathologic T1 +/- CIS had 92% CSS at 10 years. Our data suggests that some cT1 bladder cancer tumors have assiduous clinical courses evidenced in staging discrepancies. For high-grade tumors, early cystectomy and orthotopic diversion increases life expectancy significantly and should be carry out early rather than late.