Effects of post biopsy digital rectal compression on improving prostate cancer staging using magnetic resonance imaging in localized prostate cancer

Purpose: To evaluate the effectiveness of digital rectal-compression immediately after transrectal prostate biopsy (P-bx) for improving the accuracy of prostate cancer (PCa) staging. Materials and Methods: Between July 2008 and June 2010, 94 consecutive patients who had a radical prostatectomy were included in our retrospective analysis. The exclusion criteria included a history of previous P-bx and surgery, a biopsy performed in another hospital, a number of biopsy cores different from 12, or a condition interfering with bleeding assessment. The subjects were divided into two groups, compression and non-compression. All enrolled patients took magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for PCa staging. Results: The compression and non-compression groups were comparable with respect to several baseline characteristics. However, the total hemorrhage score of intraprostatic bleeding was significantly different between the groups, even with adjustment for the time from biopsy to MRI (compression:15.4±2.32, non-compression: 24.9±2.43, p<0.001). The intra-prostatic cancer location matching rate was higher in the compression group (78.0%) than in the non-compression group (70.2%) (p=0.011). Overall accuracy of staging in compression and non-compression groups was 84.7% and 77.3%, respectively. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate that digital rectal compression performed immediately after prostate biopsy to reduce intraprostatic hemorrhage improves the accuracy for detection of PCa using MRI.