Grossman - Figure 3
Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer is Dangerous!
FIG. 3: An important consideration for use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy is to realize that muscle-invasive bladder cancer is quite dangerous, and in many cases, life threatening.
This Figure illustrates outcomes of patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer treated with radical cystectomy.[1] Patients with organ-confined disease treated with radical cystectomy (top graph) have better recurrence-free survival than those with non-organ-confined disease, and patients with lymph node-positive disease have the greatest chance for tumor recurrence.
Similarly for overall survival (lower graph, where the curves reflect those in the upper graph), because when bladder cancer recurs after radical cystectomy it is frequently followed by death from bladder cancer.
References
Madersbacher S, Hochreiter W, Burkhard F, et al. Radical cystectomy for bladder cancer today--a homogeneous series without neoadjuvant therapy. J Clin Oncol. 2003;21:690−6 https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.2003.05.101
