Minimally Invasive Non-ablative Treatments for LUTS

Abstract

Prostatic stents have been an established part of the urological armamentarium since the 1980s and are available in a variety of forms. First described by Fabian in 1980 [1], the ‘urological spiral’ was seen as a means by which a patient unfit for surgery could be free of his urethral catheter. Indeed Fabian also discussed the possibility that the spiral could be treated with radioactive material to manage patients with prostate cancer. Advances in bladder neck surgery, particularly GreenLight PVP mean that men with multiple significant co-morbidities, previously deemed unfit and unsuitable for conventional TURP are now being successfully surgically managed. Thus it seems likely that the use of prostatic stents in this population has declined. We could find no public data on this. Sadly little high quality evidence exists for these devices as most publications have been on limited case series, possibly due to relatively small companies without large research budgets developing and distributing the devices.