PURPOSE: Among Medicare participants, we recently reported an increasing risk over time of hospitalization following an initial prostate biopsy.
Less is known about the relative risks of repeat prostate biopsies, which are frequently performed in prostate cancer screening and in active surveillance programs. Our goal was to determine whether repeat biopsies are associated with an increased risk of hospitalization compared to initial biopsy.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Using Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER)-linked Medicare data from 1991 to 2007, we identified 13,883 men who underwent a single prostate biopsy and 3640 with multiple biopsies. 30-day hospitalization rates were compared between these groups, and with a randomly selected control population (n=134,977). ICD-9 codes were then used to examine the frequency of serious infectious and non-infectious urological complications as the primary diagnosis for admissions.
RESULTS: Both initial and repeat biopsies were associated with a significantly increased risk of hospitalization within a 30 day period compared to randomly selected controls (p< 0.0001). However, the repeat biopsy session was not associated with a greater risk of infectious (OR 0.81, 95% 0.49-1.32, p=0.39) or serious non-infectious urological complications (OR 0.94, 95% CI 0.54-1.62, p=0.82) compared to the initial biopsy procedure.
CONCLUSIONS: Each biopsy procedure is associated with significant risk of complications compared to randomly selected controls. However, the repeat biopsy procedure itself was not associated with a greater risk of serious complications requiring hospital admission compared to the initial biopsy.
Written by:
Loeb S, Carter HB, Berndt SI, Ricker W, Schaeffer EM. Are you the author?
Department of Urology, New York University, NY, NY.
Reference: J Urol. 2012 Oct 9. pii: S0022-5347(12)05184-1.
doi: 10.1016/j.juro.2012.10.005
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 23063634
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