The impact of perioperative blood transfusion on survival outcomes in radical cystectomy patients

The impact of perioperative blood transfusion (BT) on survival outcomes has been reported in several urological and non-urological surgeries (1,2). Considering bladder cancer (BCa) patients, radical cystectomy (RC) with bilateral pelvic lymph node dissection represents the standard of care in muscle invasive and recurrent high risk non-muscle invasive disease (3). However, this procedure is related to a high risk of perioperative complications accounting for 50–60% of patients (4). In perspective, almost 30–65% of them need a perioperative BT as a direct consequence of tumor characteristics and complexity of the surgery (5). Preliminary data suggests that perioperative BT might have an impact on survival outcomes in RC patients (5).