Single institutional experience of bladder-preserving trimodality treatment for muscle-invasive bladder cancer

The authors designed this study to determine the clinical effectiveness of trimodality treatment, i.e., transurethral resection of a bladder tumor (TURBT) and concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CRT). Twenty patients with a muscle-invasive bladder cancer were treated by TURBT followed by concurrent cisplatin (75 mg/m(2) day), administered on weeks 1 and 4 of radiotherapy. According to residual tumor status after TURBT, patients were classified into patients with a complete TURBT group and incomplete TURBT group. Response to treatment was evaluated by restaging TURBT at 4 weeks after completing CRT (post-CRT). Fifteen patients (75%) achieved complete remission (CR) at restaging; 10 patients (50%) remained continuously free of tumor recurrence. Disease-specific and overall survivals were 51.1% and 38.6% at 5 yr post-CRT, respectively. Of 16 patients in the complete TURBT group, 14 patients (87.5%) achieved CR, which was significantly different from that observed in the incomplete TURBT group, in which only 1 (25%) of 4 patients achieved CR (p=0.032). Five- year disease-specific and overall survivals were 71.6% and 53.5%, respectively. Ten patients (90.9%) maintained their own bladder among the 11 surviving patients. Trimodality treatment was found to be an effective treatment in patients who underwent complete TURBT for a muscle-invasive bladder cancer.