Situación actual de los tumores del tracto urinario superior en el contexto de la pandemia por Covid-19

INTRODUCTION: First cases of COVID-19 were reported in China on December 2019 and rapidly spread globally. The explosive increase in number of cases requiring hospitalization has led to a delay in a big number of surgical interventions, including oncologic surgeries. Collateral effects of this increase means a challenge for urologists, who have been forced to redistribute their resources. Due to its poor pronostic, patients suffering from by upper tract urinary tumours will be negatively affected by this pandemic. METHODS: A non sistematic review was performed using literature published until May 23, 2020, using “Upper tract urothelial tumours”, “COVID-19” and “nephroureterectomy”. as keywords. The resulting manuscript was critically revised by national authors in order to establish common criteria about treatment and follow up. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS: Four studies were identified that assessed the impact of delaying radical nephrouretrectomy as curative treatment. These studies showed that surgery delays decrease overall survival and cancer specific survival rates in high-risk groups. On the other hand, delaying radical nephrouretrectomy due to ureteroscopy did not affect survival in cohorts of patients with predominately low-grade disease. CONCLUSIONS: A delay in curative treatment of upper tract urothelial tumours for more than three months results in adverse outcomes as overal survival and cancer specific survival. Hence, it is important to prioritize the timely care of this group of patients as far as COVID-19 pandemic allows it.