Micropapillary urothelial carcinoma of the urinary bladder: Early surgery or neoadjuvant chemotherapy?

Abstract

e16007 Background: Micropapillary bladder carcinoma is a rare variant of urothelial carcinoma (UC) of the urinary bladder. As a particularly aggressive variant, patients are often urged to undergo up-front radical cystectomy. Though data is scarce on the treatment outcomes of patients with this entity, we present the case for neoadjuvant chemotherapy as opposed to early cystectomy in the setting of clinically localized micropapillary UC. Methods: A review of records of all patients evaluated at our institution for UC was conducted to identify micropapillary UC of the bladder over the period from 2000–2007. A total of 24 cases were found, and were evaluated for preoperative pathology and clinical stage, treatment course, pathological stage and cancer specific survival. Results: Mean patient age was 67.9 years with 19 males and 5 females. Twenty-one (87.5%) patients had clinically organ confined micropapillary UC at the time of diagnosis, three had minimally enlarged lymph nodes on pelvic CAT scans. Half of our patients had BCG refractory high grade non-muscle invasive UC. Twenty-two patients (91.67%) were offered radical cystectomy as first line management. Extended lymph node dissection was performed in eleven patients (45.83%). Final pathologic examination diagnosed metastatic lymph node involvement in 20 patients (83.33%), with 4 patients (20%) having positive LN outside the standard (pelvic) template of dissection. A stage upgrade was noticed in 95.23% of cases. Median cancer specific survival was 13 months. Survival at one year was 44% and 50% at 2years, with only one patient alive at 5 years. Conclusions: Our results suggest that clinically localized micropapillary UC is often metastatic to LN at the time of presentation. This setting of frequent systemic disease should encourage standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy rather than early surgical management for these patients. Extended LN dissection is warranted in these cases due to the high incidence of nodal involvement outside the standard template. No significant financial relationships to disclose.