Comparing and Contrasting Peyronie's Disease Guidelines: Points of Consensus and Deviation.

BACKGROUND

Peyronie's disease (PD) is a challenging clinical entity. To assist clinicians with diagnosis and management, four separate organizations have published PD guidelines over the past five years, but there remains a lack of consensus and data-driven recommendations for many aspects of diagnosis and treatment.

AIM: To compare and contrast PD guidelines, highlighting key similarities and differences among the guideline panel recommendations and identify areas for further research.

METHODS

We performed an extensive review to compare and contrast diagnosis and treatment recommendations from publically available published PD guidelines from four different organizations: American Urological Association, European Association of Urology, Canadian Urologic Association, and the International Society of Sexual Medicine.

OUTCOMES: Key similarities and differences with regards to definition, evaluation, nonsurgical and surgical treatments were compared.

RESULTS

Points of general consensus among the guideline panels included: History is adequate for diagnosis of PD, and intracavernosal injection is a gold standard to evaluate penile deformity prior to invasive intervention. Careful counseling with shared decision-making is required prior to treatment. In general, plication and incision and/or grafting surgery is reserved for patients with preserved erectile function whereas penile prosthesis implantation is the only surgical option for PD patients with erectile dysfunction. Overall, nonsurgical treatments have inferior evidence of efficacy with these being the main area of controversy; however, all societies recognize that intralesional injections may be used. 0Further research into the pathophysiology of PD may direct novel treatments targeted towards early intervention and rigorous outcomes research may direct best practices for the surgical treatment of PD in the future.

CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: PD is a challenging clinical entity. Direct comparison of the published PD guidelines highlights clear standards of care as well as areas where more research is needed to promote higher levels of evidence-based practice.

STRENGTHS & LIMITATIONS: To our knowledge this is the first report to directly compare and contrast published guidelines pertaining to the diagnosis and management of PD. Limitations include the lack of evidence-quality review pertaining to individual guideline recommendations, although this was not the aim of this review.

CONCLUSION

We highlight consensus of major urologic societies on many aspects of work up and management of PD with notable exceptions which may guide further research. Manka MG, White LA, Yafi FA, et al. Comparing and Contrasting Peyronie's Disease Guidelines: Points of Consensus and Deviation. J Sex Med 2021;18:363-375.