Robotic-assisted Versus Conventional Laparoscopic Surgery in the Management of Obese Patients With Early Endometrial Cancer in the Sentinel Lymph Node Era: a Randomized Controlled Study

Background:

Endometrial cancer is the fourth cancer in women, the most common gynecologic cancer in high-income countries and the second most common gynecologic cancer worldwide.

The high incidence of endometrial cancer is associated with several risk factors, but the growing prevalence of obesity has been identified as one of the majors. Many patients with endometrial cancer are obese and have clinically relevant coexisting conditions that negatively affects anesthesiological parameters and surgical performance when patients undergo surgery, thus potentially increasing the risk of peri-operative complications.

For patients presenting at early-stage disease the standard procedure is total hysterectomy with bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy and lymph nodal staging. Prospective and retrospective studies demonstrate that compared to systemic lymphadenectomy, sentinel lymph node mapping have high accuracy in detecting nodal metastases, and together with ultrastaging may increase the detection of lymph node metastasis with low false-negative rates in patients with apparent uterine-confined disease. Also, recent evidence proved sentinel lymph node biopsy to be a feasible and safe alternative to lymphadenectomy in high-risk endometrial cancer.

Many randomized prospective studies proved laparoscopic surgical staging to be feasible in terms of short-term outcomes, equivalent in disease-free survival and no different in overall survival, thus the current surgical approach is minimally invasive. Also, innovative surgical approaches such as robotic surgery have been exploited showing equivalent oncologic outcomes when compared to traditional laparoscopic surgery.