OUTCOMES OF BLADDER PRESERVATION THERAPY ON SURVIVAL IN PATIENTS WITH MUSCLE-INVASIVE BLADDER CANCER

INTRODUCTION: The standard of care in muscle invasive bladder cancer is radical cystectomy; however; transurethral resection (TUR) followed by external radiotherapy and systemic chemotherapy demonstrates comparable results with radical cystectomy in terms of local control and survival rates. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate our results of multimodality bladder preservation therapy (BPT) in patients who had muscle-invasive bladder cancer and were reluctant to radical cystectomy. METHODS: The retrospective analysis of twenty-three patients with stage T2 transitional cell bladder cancer that were consecutively treated with BPT was performed. Treatment strategy included radical TUR followed by 3 cycles of cisplatin, gemcitabine combination, and radiotherapy of 64 Gy as adjuvant treatment. The Kaplan-Meier survival estimates and log rank were calculated. RESULTS: Median follow-up time was 58 (15-158) months. Disease-free survival (DFS) and five year overall survival (OS) rates for 23 patients were 55.9% and 63.9%, respectively. Cancer-specific OS was 67%. There were no grade 3 or higher complications. CONCLUSIONS: Our small patient group suggests that BPT can be safely applied in selected cases with bladder cancer or in patients that refused radical cystectomy.