A Proposed Tetra-modal Treatment Protocol for Muscle Invasive Urothelial Carcinoma of the Urinary Bladder

In Egypt, bladder cancer has been the most common cancer during the past 50 years. In 2002, Egypt's world-standardized bladder cancer incidence was 37/ 100,000, representing approximately 30,000 new cases each year. About 25% of new diagnoses are muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), which carry a worse prognosis compared to non-muscle invasive disease. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) followed by radical cystectomy (RC) with bilateral pelvic lymphadenectomy is considered the standard of care for treatment of MIBC by multiple international guidelines. However, this is associated with a significant impact on quality of life. The effect of our proposed Tetra-modal treatment protocol for muscle invasive Urothelial carcinoma of the urinary bladder on muscle invasive bladder cancer recurrence free survival, cancer specific survival, and overall survival? Koga developed a selective bladder-sparing protocol with a tetra modal therapy comprising maximal transurethral resection of bladder tumor, induction chemoradiation (CRT), and consolidative partial cystectomy (PC) with pelvic lymph node dissection, allowing the confirmation of CRT response pathologically. In the preliminary analysis of the initial cases enrolled in their protocol, none of the patients who completed the protocol with consolidative PC experienced MIBC recurrence, suggesting that consolidative PC may improve local cancer control in the preserved bladder by surgically eliminating possible cancer remnants after CRT. Our proposed Tetra-modal treatment protocol for MIBC is supposed to eliminate the surgical difficulties of performing PC in a radiated field and hence decrease the post operative complications of PC.