DALLAS, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- A U.S. urologist says prostate surgery patients all too often perceive a new approach will be significantly superior.
Dr. Yair Lotan of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas says patients deserve to have a realistic expectation of surgical outcomes.
"Notably the main information that a patient must know is not the prostatectomy approach but surgeon experience," Lotan says in a statement.
Lotan says studies show the primary determinant of prostatectomy outcome is surgical volume and patients should be educated on likely outcomes of a procedure based on individual surgeon experience, but unfortunately this information is often hard to obtain.
Lotan was commenting on a study by Dr. William Lowrance and colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, published in the Journal of Urology, that compared surgical outcomes in almost 6,000 men age 66 and older with clinically localized prostate cancer and found no differences in complication rates or mortality among the different types of surgery.
