Retzius Sparing Robotic Prostatectomy VS Conventional Robotic Prostatectomy
In the world of prostate surgery, it’s important to know your choices. 🤔
Watch our third Prostate Cancer Awareness Month video with Dr. Tan Teck Wei, Senior Consultant Urologist at UROHEALTH MEDICAL CLINIC (a member of Healthway Medical), as he explains the empowering concept of retzius sparing robotic prostatectomy versus traditional approaches.
Transcript
0:13
For cancer that is localised to the prostate or early-stage cancer, this means that cancer is only situated within the prostate and has not spread. So the aim for such cases is to cure the cancer.
0:24
The two standard treatments that we have are either surgery, to remove the entire prostate, or radiotherapy, which utilises x-rays to kill the cancer cells within the prostate itself.
0:37
In terms of surgery, the standard of care nowadays is to do keyhole surgery using a robot. The benefit of keyhole surgery is that with small incisions, we can complete the entire surgery of removing the prostate
and joining the bladder down to the urine pipe.
So by using small incisions, the recovery is faster as most patients stay for about 2 nights in hospital, and get back to normal activities quickly. In addition, with the robot’s magnified view, we can see clearly and dissect precisely and do a good joining between the bladder and the urine pipe.
By using small incisions the recovery is faster most patients stay for about two nights in hospital and they get back to normal activities quickly. There is a lot of benefits to using the robot to do the surgery.
1:29
In the traditional surgery, we would drop the bladder off the anterior abdominal wall so we tackle the bladder and prostate from the top in front of the gladder and the prostate.
The problem with this approach is that once you drop the attachment of the bladder, the bladder is more mobile, it’s less fixed in place so that may contribute to worse urine control initially after surgery and patients may take a few months to
recover.
Because the bladder has been moved from its original position and is much more mobile, we do see that after surgery men may struggle to regain urine control. In fact, studies have shown that some men may take a few months to recover, although by one year, only about 10% of men will still have a urine leakage problem.
2:16
The second downside for surgery is that because the nerves that control erection are beside the prostate so when we remove the prostate, some of these nerves are damaged so men may struggle to get good erections after surgery.
In recent years, there have been some modifications to the traditional robotic surgery. One of them is what we call Retzius-Sparing Surgery.
2:36
Retzius-Sparing Surgery is a modification where we do not drop the bladder; we actually tackle the prostate from behind the bladder, so it’s a narrower view, operating on top instead of looking down, so it’s more challenging, but the benefit is that because you do not disturb the bladder in its original position, studies have shown that has a significantly much faster urine recover after surgery.
