Emerging Minimally Invasive Treatment Options for Male Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms.

CONTEXT

Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) are one of the most common and troublesome nonmalignant conditions affecting quality of life in aging men. A spectrum of established medical and surgical options is available to provide relief of bothersome LUTS. Both the adverse events of medication and the morbidity with surgical treatment modalities have to be counterbalanced against efficacy. Novel minimally invasive treatment options aim to be effective, ideally to be performed in an ambulatory setting under local anaesthesia and to offer a more favourable safety profile than existing reference techniques.

OBJECTIVE

A comprehensive, narrative review of novel minimally invasive treatment modalities for the management of male LUTS due to benign prostatic enlargement is presented.

EVIDENCE ACQUISITION

Medline, PubMed, Cochrane database, and Embase were screened for randomised controlled trials (RCTs), clinical trials, and reviews on novel minimally invasive treatment options for male LUTS due to benign prostatic enlargement.

EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS

With regard to newly devised intraprostatic injectables (botulinum neurotoxin A, NX1207, PRX302), PRX302 is currently the only substance that was superior to placebo in a phase 3 RCT providing proof of efficacy and safety. The prostatic urethral lift technique has been evaluated in several phase 3 trials showing rapid and durable relief of LUTS without compromising sexual function in carefully selected patients without a prominent median lobe. The first clinical experience of the temporary implantable nitinol device demonstrated that implantation of this novel device is a safe procedure, easy, and fast to perform. Further studies are required to evaluate efficacy, durability, and to define appropriate patient selection. New ablative approaches like the image guided robotic waterjet ablation (AquaBeam) or procedures based on convective water vapour energy (Rezūm) are in the early stages of development. Prostatic artery embolization performed by interventional radiologists at specialised centres shows a high technical success rate in the treatment of bothersome LUTS. However, a substantial clinical failure rate and a particular spectrum of complications not commonly seen after urologic interventions do occur and need to be critically evaluated.

CONCLUSIONS

Initial promising clinical results on novel minimally invasive treatment options indicate efficacy comparable to standard techniques, often associated with a more favourable safety profile, in particular with preservation of sexual function. Many of these techniques are in their infancy and based on experience of new developments in the past. Further RCTs are required to evaluate efficacy, safety, and durability of novel techniques with long-term follow-up and careful evaluation of the selection criteria, which have been applied in clinical trials. The prostatic urethral lift is the only procedure with Level 1 evidence data and that can therefore be recommended for treatment of male LUTS in clinical practice for selected patients.

PATIENT SUMMARY

Minimally invasive treatment options have been developed to provide relief of lower urinary tract symptoms comparable to standard surgical techniques with a more favourable safety profile. However, long-term clinical evaluation is still needed for most of these innovations before they can be recommended to be an effective replacement for standard surgical treatment.