Evolution of cystectomy care over an 11-year period in a high-volume tertiary referral centre

To describe the evolution in radical cystectomy (RC) care over 11 years at a referral centre.

The clinical data of patients undergoing either open RC (ORC) or robot-assisted RC (RARC) for cT1-4aN0M0 bladder cancer (BCa) at our centre between January 2006 and December 2016 were retrospectively evaluated. Crude and propensity score-weighted log-binomial regression analyses were conducted to assess the association between pre- and peri-operative variables and the risk of reoperation, intensive care unit (ICU) admission and death <90 days after RC.

A total of 814 patients were considered. The percentage of RARCs performed increased (from 10% to 100%) between 2006 and 2013. Overall, 29% of the patients received neoadjuvant chemotherapy (12-37% from 2006 to 2016). Despite no differences in terms of operating time, pelvic lymph node dissection (PLND) was more commonly attempted during RARC and extended PLND was more frequently performed in the RARC group (72% vs 19%; P < 0.001). Ileal conduit was the preferred urinary diversion in both groups, and more patients in the RARC group underwent neobladder construction (34% vs 14%; P < 0.001). The overall rates of re-intervention, ICU admission and death within 90 days of RC were 8.9%, 5.4% and 2.9%, respectively. On crude analysis, RARC was associated with a reduced risk of ICU admission (relative risk [RR] 0.42, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.23-0.77; P = 0.005), reintervention (RR 0.58, 95% CI 0.37-0.90; P = 0.015) and death (RR 0.37, 95% CI 0.16-0.85; P = 0.020); however, these risk reductions were not statistically significant on weighted analyses.

The introduction of RARC has coincided with a reduction in the rate of ICU admission, reoperation and death within 90 days of surgery, without compromising operating time, PLND extent or neobladder utilization.