Surgical Management of Anterior Urethral Stricture: A 23-year Single-Center Study

Anterior urethral stricture is a common clinical condition in urology with significant socioeconomic impacts and is associated with high recurrence rates of and postoperative complications. However, the long-term outcome of surgical management of urethra stricture and the associated risk factors of stricture recurrence remain limited. We conducted a 23-year single-center retrospective study to evaluate the long-term surgical outcomes of anterior urethral strictures with different clinical characteristics and to study factors that contribute to stricture recurrence.

A retrospective study was conducted on 145 male patients diagnosed with anterior urethral stricture, who underwent meatotomy, anastomotic urethroplasty (AU), penile skin flap urethroplasty (PFU), single-stage buccal mucosa grafting (SSU), or multistage buccal mucosa grafting (MSU) between April 2000 and August 2023. We defined 100 months as the cut-off time point to distinguish short-term and long-term follow-up. Early surgical complications were scored using the Clavien-Dindo classification at 3 months. Patient-Reported Outcome Measure (PROM) was applied to evaluate surgical success. Risk factors for wound complications were evaluated using univariable and multivariable analysis.

The overall mean stricture length was 2.3 ± 1.8 cm (a range of 0.3-7.0). Stricture locations were at the meatus, fossa navicularis, penile, bulbar, and multifocal in 15, 36, 79, 9, and 6. The short-term and long-term success rate for meatotomy, AU, PFU, SSU, and MSU were 70.0%/80%, 70.4%/62.5%, 77.8%/69.2%, 100%/75%, and 81.8%/66.7%, respectively. The early complications classified as Clavien grades I, II, III, IV, and V were 39, 5, 5, 0, and 0. The late complication rate in the short-term and long-term groups were 20.3% and 30.3% (p > 0.05). The satisfaction survey showed that 74.5% (108 of 145) patients were satisfied or very satisfied with the surgical result. There was no statistically significant difference in stricture-free survival among the five surgical groups (Log rank test: χ² = 3.83, p > 0.05). The binary univariate logistic regression analysis showed that stricture symptom duration (p < 0.05) and previous urethroplasty (p < 0.05) were independent predictors of surgery failure.

This long-term retrospective study on male anterior urethral stricture disease demonstrates that surgical management is an effective and functional treatment. However, the success rate of urethroplasty shows a declining trend with longer follow-up. Stricture symptom duration and previous urethroplasty carry a high risk of surgical failure.