You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 30, Issue 2
  • A comparison of disease recurrence between robotic versus laparotomy approach in patients with intermediate-risk endometrial cancer

Article Text

Article menu

This article has a correction. Please see:

Download PDFPDF

Original research
A comparison of disease recurrence between robotic versus laparotomy approach in patients with intermediate-risk endometrial cancer
Free
  1. Jiheon Song1,
  2. Tien Le2,
  3. Laura Hopkins3,
  4. Michael Fung-Kee-Fung2,
  5. Krystine Lupe1,
  6. Marc Gaudet1,
  7. Choan E1 and
  8. Rajiv Samant1
  1. 1 Radiation Oncology, The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
  2. 2 Gynecologic Oncology, The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
  3. 3 Gynecologic Oncology, Saskatoon Cancer Centre, Saskatoon, Ontario, Canada
  1. Correspondence to Dr Jiheon Song, Radiation Oncology, The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, ON K1H 8L4, Canada; jisong{at}toh.ca

Abstract

Objective Advances in minimally invasive surgery, particularly with robotic surgery, have resulted in improved peri-operative outcomes in patients with endometrial cancer. In addition, randomized trials have shown that addition of adjuvant radiotherapy following surgery improves loco-regional disease control among stage I intermediate-risk endometrial cancer patients. We aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of combined treatment of robotic surgery and adjuvant radiotherapy in this patient population.

Methods A single-center retrospective study was conducted on stage I endometrioid-type endometrial cancer patients with intermediate-risk features (<50% myometrial involvement and grade 2–3 histopathology, or >50% myometrial involvement and grade 1–2 histopathology) treated with hysterectomy and adjuvant radiotherapy between January 2010 and December 2015. Data on surgery and radiotherapy were collected and correlated with clinical and surgical outcomes using log-rank. Oncologic outcomes were then compared between robotic surgery and laparotomy.

Results A total of 179 intermediate-risk endometrial cancer patients were identified, of whom 135 (75.4%) received adjuvant radiotherapy and were included in the final analysis. Median age at diagnosis was 63 years (range 40–89) and median follow-up was 4.7 years (range 1.1–8.8). Seventy-seven patients (57%) underwent robotic surgery and 58 patients (43%) underwent laparotomy. Surgical staging with lymph node dissection was performed on 79.3% of the patients. The majority of patients (79.3%) received vaginal brachytherapy as part of adjuvant radiotherapy, while 20.7% received external-beam radiotherapy. Among the entire cohort, eight (5.9%) patients recurred and all eight recurrences occurred in the robotic surgery group; no recurrence was found in the laparotomy group. This translated into 5 year disease-free survival of 100% in the laparotomy group, compared with 91.8% in the robotic surgery group (p=0.005). No difference in overall survival was found between the two groups (p=0.51).

Conclusion Oncologic outcomes for stage I intermediate-risk endometrial cancer treated with hysterectomy and adjuvant radiotherapy at our institution are comparable to the previously published literature. The higher recurrence rate observed with robotic surgery at our institution has not been observed previously and requires further investigation.

  • endometrial cancer
  • radiotherapy
  • robotic surgery

https://doi.org/10.1136/ijgc-2019-000838

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Correction notice Since this article was first published online, figure 3 and the supplementary table 1 have been updated.

    • Contributors All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by JS, TL, LH, MF-K-F, KL, MG, CE and RS. The first draft of the manuscript was written by JS and study conceptualization and design were performed by TL and RS. Manuscript review and editing were performed by TL, LH, MF-K-F, KL and MG. Supervision of the study was conducted by RS.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Ethics approval All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data availability statement Data are available upon reasonable request.

    Linked Articles