Vasectomy by electrocautery: outcomes in a series of 2,500 patients

The effectiveness of the electrocautery technique of vasectomy is compared with the more commonly used ligation technique. Twenty-five hundred cases of vasectomy by electrocautery are presented. The men were Americans who selected vasectomy over a period of 11 years. All cases were performed by one unvarying technique. The vas was cut, and the lumen was cauterized. One end was covered, and all bleeding sites were cauterized. The failure rate in this series was 0.24 percent. A review of the world literature shows that failure rates of the common ligation techniques ranged from 1 to 6 percent. It appears that the electrocautery technique has about one tenth the failures of the standard ligation technique.