SIU Congress 2016: Bladder cancer: Underutilization of radical cystectomy among elderly patients diagnosed with clinical stage T2 muscle-invasive bladder cancer - Session Highlights
Buenos Aires, Argentina (UroToday.com) Dr. Ghaffary from The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, presented a large population-based review of radical cystectomy utilization in the United States. This work has been done previously with data from SEER-Medicare using 1992-2002 data with 21% use of RC among these patients.
The current study used similar methodology to provide a contemporary review of treatment in a cohort 2002-2011. Utilization was low at 18.9% despite RC having the greatest overall and disease-specific survival benefit. Older patients with increased comorbidities, non-Hispanic black patients were significantly less likely to undergo RC. These results, while not surprising, highlight the importance of identifying interventions to improve RC use especially in those most susceptible to underuse. Interesting, this study assessed urologist density where increased number of urologists did not increase RC use suggesting not the number of urologists which are needed but efforts to improve access to urologists who perform RC are needed. Centralization of RC began at the turn of the century and occurs today, however, clearly mechanisms to improve regionalization of care who provide RC are needed.
World Urological Oncology Federation Symposium at the SIU Congress 2016 - October 20 - 23, 2016 – Buenos Aires, Argentina
Written By: Stephen B. Williams, M.D., Assistant Professor in Urology, The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX. and Ashish Kamat, M.D. Professor, Department of Urology, Division of Surgery, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX.