Editorial: Is the modified sliding technique the way forward in Peyronie’s surgery?

The old goal of prosthetic surgery, which aimed to guarantee a hard and straight penis good enough for penetrative intercourse, is likely to have now become obsolete. Various authors have reported that patients with Peyronie’s disease (PD) and severe corporal fibrosis who undergo penile prosthesis implantation tend to report the lowest satisfaction rates, mainly because of significant penile length loss [1, 2]. In particular, according to Kueronya et al. [3], ~80% of patients affected by PD perceive a degree of penile shortening before surgery, and any further loss of length attributable to the surgical correction leads to bother among all the affected patients. All attempts at penile length restoration during prosthetic surgery should therefore be welcomed in order to achieve higher patient satisfaction.

Initial attempts at penile length restoration involved a full disassembly of the penis and the use of a circumferential graft [4]. Then, in 2012, Rolle et al. [5] described the sliding technique, a modification of the circumferential graft that consists of a double dorsal-ventral patch and should therefore provide more stability to the corpora cavernosa than a circumferential graft.

The present series by Egydio et al. [6] describes a modified sliding technique without grafting the defect of the tunica albuginea. This reduces the operating time and theoretically infection rates should therefore be reduced.

Although leaving a defect in the tunica albuginea should, in theory, lead to a haematoma formation and potentially infection of the device, in the present series, no penile prosthesis infections were reported.

Although we believe that cutting corners in surgery is not the way forward, the authors of the present paper should be congratulated because the postoperative results in their series are very encouraging. In fact, the mean penile length gain in their series was 3.1 cm, with no reported infections requiring the explantation of the penile prosthesis and with an average increase in International Index of Erectile Function score of 36.

Certainly, if the results of the present series can be confirmed in the future, this technique will revolutionize the concept that any tunical defect >1 cm in size needs to be grafted to prevent aneurysmal dilatation of the cylinders of an inflatable penile prosthesis [7], as none of the inflatable cylinders in the series developed aneurysms.