Mr Steve Garnett, Consultant Urologist, talks about Aquablation® treatment (3 videos)
What is Aquablation® treatment?
Aquablation® is a treatment for benign prostate enlargement, and it uses high pressure water jets to ablate or destroy the prostate tissue that's causing a blockage. Now, the special thing about Aquablation® is that it's a new robotic procedure. So, we use an ultrasound probe to accurately map the prostate and then we design how much prostate we want to ablate. And then actually, a robot-controlled arm uses the high-pressure water to ablate the prostate according to the plan that we've made.
How long does it take to recover from Aquablation®?
The Aquablation® procedure is usually done here at Benenden Hospital, one night stay in hospital and you have a catheter in for that night. Then the next day, the catheter comes out and patients go home. So, for the first couple of weeks, you might have a little bit of stinging, burning and maybe going to the toilet a little bit more often. But by two weeks that should have pretty much completely settled down, and most patients are fully recovered by four weeks.
How long does Aquablation® last?
The Aquablation® procedure itself takes about an hour and 15 minutes or so to do. And the results of the procedure seem to be extremely durable. There have been several trials now showing equivalent results to the standard treatments at five years. As it's a newer treatment, we don't have long, long term follow up, but it looks very promising at this stage.
