Abstract:
Radical prostatectomy is a common treatment for localised prostate cancer. The traditional open prostatectomy is more and more replaced by robotic surgery.
In this study we compared two groups of patients, which had been performed surgery by the same surgeon either conventional open ( n = 174) or robot-assisted ( n = 128). Therefore we retrospectively collected individual, clinical, peri- and postoperative parameters from the patient records and worked up in a database.
Data showed less blood loss and a shorter hospital length of stay for the robot-assisted collective. At the beginning the operation time for the robotic surgery was clearly longer than for the open prostatectomy. With an increasing number of cases, however, the operation time decreased rapidly and aligned with the time of open surgery. Also, the complication rate for the da Vinci surgery was lower, which was due to the lower transfusion rate and the significantly lower number of lymphoceles. For other complications, there was no difference. In the oncological outcome, the number of positive surgical margins in patients with pathologically localised cancer was around eight percentage points higher for robot-assisted surgery than for open surgery.
Overall our data equals those of the recent literature. There are, however, large variations especially for positiv surgical margins. Further studies will be needed to determine whether the robot-assisted surgery is comparable to conventional open surgery as far as tumor control is concerned. Also there was no clear superiority for the da Vinci system in terms of continence and potency.
These large fluctuations also show that it depends primarily on the experience of the surgeon and not necessarily on the operation method. The robot-assisted surgery should not be considered as a new gold standard, but must continue to prove itself against the long established open surgery, which showed in numerous studies good results.