A minimally invasive, robotic surgery commonly used for performing hysterectomies in women with early stage cervical cancer actually boosts the risk of a woman dying, researchers warned on Wednesday. A pair of studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine sound the alarm about a surgery that has quickly become the go-to option for many women, even before its outcome was thoroughly studied.
"At this point, we would recommend only using open surgery to perform a radical hysterectomy for cervical cancer," said co-senior author Shohreh Shahabi, chief of gynecologic oncology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. When a woman is diagnosed with cervical cancer, she often gets her uterus and cervix removed, an operation known as a radical hysterectomy. Minimally invasive radical hysterectomy using either laparoscopic or robot-assisted procedures have been around since 1992, but ballooned in popularity in the last decade.
More than 60 percent of hysterectomies performed on women with early stage cervical cancer in 2013 were done in a minimally invasive way, allowing women to go home the same day. The procedure involves inflating the abdomen with gas and operating through small incisions, using a camera and a robotic instrument. In comparison, a traditional, open hysterectomy requires a long incision through the center of the abdomen and several days of hospitalization.
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