Background: Bladder cancer is the 9th most prevalent disease worldwide, ranking 13th in cancer mortality. Despite aggressive surgical treatments and systemic chemotherapy, patients with locally advanced bladder cancer (LABC) have a poor prognosis. In patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), perioperative chemotherapy adds just a small but significant absolute survival benefit to surgery alone.
Aim: This study aims to assess the clinical-epidemiological characteristics of LABC patients presented to the Clinical Oncology and Nuclear Medicine Department at Mansoura university hospitals from January 2010 to November 2016. Also, it assesses progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OAS) of LABC patients with different treatment plans.
Material and methods: This is a retrospective study that includes 135 patients presented with LABC. Data on demographics and clinical outcomes were collected from the patients' medical records for descriptive studies.
Results: Our patient's ages ranged from 47 to 75 years old. The most common diagnoses stage in our patients were N0 (55.6%), followed by N2 (23.7%).
As regards treatment modalities in our study, four main groups of treatment approaches were scheduled to include 124 patients either treated by radical surgery (9.6%), chemotherapy only (16.3%), radiotherapy (19.2%), or concomitant chemoradiotherapy (46.7%).
Complete response (CR) was observed in 31.1% of studied patients and disease progression was documented in 11.1%
Conclusion:
MIBC accounts for about 75% of bladder malignancies. However, radical cystectomy is the gold standard for achieving high OAS rates. Another option is to adopt tri-modality therapy to preserve the native bladder and achieve satisfactory OAS and PFS data.