Building Bladders Inside the Body
MIAMI (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- They help surgeons remove diseased organs … now robots are also building new ones inside the body. It's an option that boosts the chances of survival for patients who lose an organ to cancer.
Daniel Lehrman's battle with bladder cancer began nine years ago. He fought and won twice. Then it came back a third time.
"Not to say that I wasn't anxious and scared, because I certainly was," Lehrman told Ivanhoe.
Surgeons needed to remove his bladder to boost his chance of surviving. They used a robot not only to pull out the diseased organ but to build him a new one.
"It's six operations put together as a package deal," Murugesan Manoharan, M.D., associate professor of urology at the University of Miami in Miami, Fla., told Ivanhoe. "The idea is to have less pain for the patient, faster ambulation, and the patient can go home sooner and get back to their life."
Doctors pulled out the cancerous bladder through a two-inch incision. Surgeons then directed the robot to cut a two-foot piece of the small intestine, fold it over and stitch it into a new bladder … all inside Lehrman's body.
"If you use their own tissue, there's no question of rejection," Dr. Manoharan said.
The surgery improved Lehrman's odds dramatically.
"When the odds go from 70 to 80 percent chance of recurrence down to 10 percent, most people, myself included, go 'Hey, those are nice numbers!'" Lehrman said.
A man who plans to do a lot more living and a lot less worrying.
With the robot, doctors expect patients to stay in the hospital for a shorter length of time and return to work sooner than with open surgery, but no comparative study has been conducted so far. Bladder cancer is the fifth most common cancer in the United States, and at least half of people who have it will have a recurrence.
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