ROBOT surgery may help ease lymphoedema, a common and often painful side-effect of breast cancer surgery.
The standard operation to alleviate lymphoedema – which affects about one in five women who have had lymph nodes removed, causing limb swelling – is so intricate it isn’t offered routinely to patients.
Eight women at Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands had the robot-assisted procedure to ease their arm lymphoedema. The robot, which the surgeon operates via joysticks, prevents tremors in the surgeon’s hands and makes the procedure on the tiny vessels, from 0.3 mm to 0.8 mm in diameter, easier, doctors wrote in Nature Communications. Larger trials are planned.
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