Placenta wrap halves erection recovery time — SkimNews
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- Sanjay Razdan at HCA Florida Kendall Hospital wrapped cavernous nerves in 4-by-6-cm dried amniotic membrane sheets during 2,560 radical prostatectomies between 2014 and 2024.
- Wrap recipients achieved a first erection in an average of 7 days — half the 14 days logged for 1,495 men the same surgeon operated on before 2014.
- At three months, 75% of men with the wrap had erections sufficient for penetration, compared with 60% without it.
- After an average eight-year follow-up, the study found no difference in cancer outcomes between the two groups, easing concerns that growth factors in the membrane could spur tumors.
- The idea came from neurosurgeon colleagues at the hospital who already used donated placental membranes to promote nerve healing in other procedures.
- Arthur Burnett at Johns Hopkins Medicine called the findings promising but said randomized clinical trials are required to confirm the effect.
- Shirin Razdan, Sanjay's daughter and HCA Florida Kendall colleague, now uses the wrap in her own prostate removals and is trialing it for Peyronie's disease.
Why it matters: For men undergoing radical prostatectomy, the wrap roughly halved time to first erection and lifted three-month potency rates by 15 percentage points — but the evidence is a single-surgeon retrospective review, and an independent RCT is needed before the technique can be considered standard of care.
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