Urinary Reconstruction in Genital Gender-Affirming Surgery: Checking Our Surgical Complication Blind Spots.

Abstract

Urologic complications in genital gender-affirming surgery are imperfectly measured, with existing evidence limited by "blind spots" that will not be resolved through implementation of patient-reported outcomes alone. Some blind spots are expected in a surgical field with rapidly expanding techniques, and they may be exacerbated by factors related to transgender health. The authors provide a narrative review of systematic reviews published in the past decade to describe the current options for genital gender-affirming surgery and surgeon-reported complications, as well as contrasting peer-reviewed sources with data not reported by the primary surgeon. In combination with expert opinion, these findings help estimate complication rates. Eight systematic reviews describe complications in patients undergoing vaginoplasty, including 5% to 16.3% mean incidence of meatal stenosis and 7% to 14.3% mean incidence of vaginal stenosis. Compared with surgeon-reported cohorts, patients undergoing vaginoplasty or vulvoplasty in other reports had higher rates of voiding dysfunction (47% to 66% versus 5.6% to 33%), incontinence (23% to 33% versus 4% to 19.3%), or misdirected urinary stream (33% to 55% versus 9.5% to 33%). Outcomes in six reviews of phalloplasty and metoidioplasty included urinary fistula (14% to 25%), urethral stricture or meatal stenosis (8% to 12.2%), and ability to stand to void (73% to 99%). Higher rates of fistula (39.5% to 56.4%) and stricture (31.8% to 65.5%) were observed in alternate cohorts, along with previously unreported complications such as vaginal remnant requiring reoperation. The literature does not completely describe urologic complications of genital gender-affirming surgery. In addition to standardized, robustly validated patient-reported outcome measures, future research on surgeon-reported complications would benefit from using the IDEAL (idea, development, exploration, assessment, and long-term study) framework for surgical innovation.