Optimal Adjuvant Intravesical Therapy for Intermediate Risk Non Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Bladder cancer (BC) represents a frequent urologic malignancy, and is mainly diagnosed as non-muscle invasive, At presentation, approximately 30% of patients have muscle-invasive BC (clinical T2 or higher) .

Both the natural history of non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) and its treatment strategies are highly variable. Although some patients never experience disease recurrence, others experience disease progression and eventually die of their disease .

In the absence of intravesical treatment, a patient with non-muscle-invasive BC has a 47% probability of disease recurrence within 5 years of diagnosis and a 9% probability of progression to muscle-invasive disease .

Low-, intermediate- and high-risk categories have been defined to help guide the treatment of patients with NMIBC (Ta, T1, and CIS). Treatment of NMIBC is now relatively well-defined for high-risk and low-risk disease presentation, and awaits further refinement through improvements in therapeutic options .

Solitary low-grade tumors, especially smaller lesions (3 cm or less), respond best to resection and immediate instillation of intravesical agents, whereas higher risk lesions, such as carcinoma in situ and high-grade T1 stage disease, have demonstrated good response to BCG when given on a schedule of induction (an initial 6-week course) and maintenance (3-weekly courses every 6 months for 3 years) .