Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among Americans after skin cancer.
According to the American Cancer Society’s estimation, there were nearly 174,650 new patients diagnosed with prostate cancer and approximately 31,620 men died from prostate cancer in the United States in 2019. Prostate cancer is commonly found in older men, especially African American men. At least six in 10 cases are diagnosed in men above 65 years of age and it is quite rare in men under 40 years age.
Although prostate cancer can be a serious type of cancer, most men diagnosed with the condition do not die from it. It has been found that nearly 3 million American men who have been diagnosed with the condition at some point in their lives are still alive today.
Surgery is often recommended when it comes to treating prostate cancer if it has not spread outside the gland. Radical prostatectomy is one of the most common types of surgery recommended for prostate cancer. In this type of surgery, surgeons remove the entire gland along with some of the surrounding tissue, which also includes the seminal vesicles. Men who undergo radical prostatectomy often have side effects such as impotence or urinary incontinence.
Recently, the University of Alabama implemented the new da Vinci SP single port surgical system by Intuitive Surgical.
The director of robotic surgery at the University of Alabama, Dr. Jeffrey Nix, said, “We’re trying to continue to push the frontier of what we can do minimally invasively.”
Dr. Nix added, “It becomes less about the number of incisions and more about what’s the end goal? Can we do surgeries that we couldn’t do before minimally? For example, can we carry this off label? Can we use these skills in this minimally invasive approach to do things we couldn’t do before? Can we do the same operation that we would do open and do it with less morbidity for the patients? And one of the factors that is constantly looked at here is length of stay in the hospital.” It has been found that this new surgical technology for prostate cancer is effective and helps patients to recover quickly than a radical prostatectomy surgery.
