Study design

prospective

Study time

2009-2016

Country

Italy

Object

We included patients with intermediate- and high-risk prostate cancer who underwent pelvic lymph node dissection (e-PLND).

Inclusion criteria

The following exclusion criteria were applied to the dataset: previous medical treatment for urological disease (yes or unknown) to exclude a neoadjuvant treatment effect on the postoperative pathological features; metastatic disease, including initial PSA > 100 ng/ml as a proxy of metastatic dissemition and cN1 disease; number of biopsy cores <8; low-risk PCa according to the d’Amico ARTICLE IN PRESS 2 L. Tosco et al. / Urologic Oncology: Semirs and Origil Investigations 00 (2019) 1−10 classification [15]; no lymph node dissection or unknown; missing data on cT stage, initial PSA, bGS, number of biopsy cores, number of positive cores, pN stage, and filly values considered erroneous (CONSORT diagram in Fig. 1). Clinical T stage was excluded in case there was no specification of T3 subcategory (T3a, T3b) and it was assessed at the discretion of the treating urologists by digital rectal examition or by imaging.

Sample size

1654

Topic classification

Prediction

Keypoint

A risk of lymph node invasion > 7% is proposed as cut-off above which e-PLND is recommended.

Year