Utility of Pre-Transplant Bladder Cycling for Patients With a Defunctionalized Bladder. A Randomized Controlled Trial

To study the necessity of pre-transplant programmed bladder cycling (PBC) in patients with defunctionalized bladder (DB).

This RCT included renal transplant (RT) candidates with DB. Eligible patients were assigned to 2 groups, group I underwent PBC before RT and group II underwent direct RT into the DB. The primary outcome was to assess the efficacy of PBC in improving post- RT bladder capacity. Secondly, to compare its impact on early urological complications and 3-month voiding function and 1-year graft function and survival. Graft function was evaluated using serum creatinine and eGFR using MDRD equation.

Groups I included 23 patients and group II included 20 patients. The mean ±SD of bladder capacity was 88.7±11.7mL and 90.6 ±9.8mL in both groups, respectively (P = .5). In group I, PBC increased bladder capacity to 194.7 ±21.2 mL (P < .001). Targeted bladder capacity was achieved in 19 (82.6 %) patients and 2 patients developed UTI. At 3-months, bladder capacity, compliance and bladder contractility index improved significantly in both groups with a significant reduction in maximum detrusor pressure with no significant difference between both groups (P = .3,0.4, 0.2 and 0.8, respectively). Urinary leakage occurred in one (4.3%) and 3 patients (15%) in group 1 and 2, respectively (P = .2). At 1-year, no statistically significant differences in the median (IQR) serum creatinine (P = .05) and eGFR (P = .07) between both groups were noted.

Pre-transplant PBC for DB-patients provided no clinical advantage concerning post-operative urological complication, urodynamic criteria and graft function and survival.