Laparoscopic urinary diversions

The treatment of the invasive bladder cancer and the recurrent T1G3 is clearly established in radical cystectomy and pelvic linphadenectomy. One of the fields where the laparoscopic approach implies more doubts is the treatment of bladder cancer, because it requires experience enough in pelvic laparoscopic surgery and the urinary diversion implies great technical difficulties to the laparoscopic approach. The main goal of this article is to report our results with the urinary diversion after laparoscopic radical cystectomy where the ureteral anastomosis has been performed by a laparoscopic approach. From January 2005 to December 2007 we have performed 67 laparoscopic radical cistectomies. We conducted 28 laparoscopic urinary diversions with our technique: 7 neobladder with an average age of 54, 85 years and 21 ileal conduit with an average age of 69, 15 years. The averagesurgical time for enterocistoplasty with laparoscopic urethral and ureteral anastomosis is of 5 hours and 30 minutes. For the cutaneous ureteroileostomy with laparoscopic ureteral anastomosis the average surgical time has been of 4 hours and 30 minutes. We have had 1 case of urinary leakage in the laparoscopic neobladder and 3 cases in the laparoscopic ileal conduit (14%). We have not intestinal dehiscence nor ileal-ureteric stenosis. The average hospital stay for laparoscopic neobladder is for the 85% of cases of 13.6 days, and of 11.8 days for the 77.7% of ileal ureteric laparoscopies. The laparoscopic radical cystectomy is still a procedure reserved for groups with great experience in laparoscopic surgery. Nowadays, the most accepted procedure by most groups includes perform the cystectomy by a laparoscopic approach and the urinary diversion by an open approach. There is no evidence of the advantages of laparoscopic urinary diversion. It is necessary to perform comparative studies to clearly define the role of laparoscopic surgery in the urinary diversion.