Patient Outcomes
Like most surgeons, Dr. Mani Menon measures his success in eliminating prostate cancer from a patient’s body by looking at the surgical margins – or the edges of tissue on the removed prostate – and by measuring PSA blood levels after surgery. Whether a cancer can be removed completely depends on two factors, the skill of the surgeon and how bad the cancer is. Thus no surgeon, regardless of his or her skill, will be successful in removing all the cancer if the cancer is aggressive or particularly bad.
At Henry Ford Hospital, surgeons tend to operate on more aggressive cancers than at other institutions, and yet Dr. Menon's groundbreaking robotic radical prostatectomy technique has truly impressive results.
- 95-98% of his patients with organ-confined, low volume, low-PSA cancer had negative margins.
- 95% or more of Dr. Menon's patients have had no detectable PSA in the blood in follow up visits.
- Most patients go home within 24 hours.
- Most patients have very little blood loss or pain.
- Dr. Menon's techniques minimize the risk for frustrating prostate surgery side effects once considered inevitable, like incontinence and erectile dysfunction.
- As of 2010, of the 5,000+ people who've had the Vattikutui Institute Prostatectomy (VIP) procedure, only six went on to die of cancer (less than .2%).
