Early-Stage Cervical Cancer: Is There a Place for Conservative Treatment?

Recent advances in screening and early diagnosis have decreased cervical cancer incidence and mortality rate in high-resource settings. The postponement of childbearing and the young age of women at diagnosis produced new challenges in the management of this disease. In recent years, attention has been directed to assessing more conservative procedures that can reduce treatment-related morbidity, without compromising oncologic safety and reproductive potential. Fertility sparing surgery (FSS) procedures, including cervical conization, simple or radical trachelectomy with pelvic nodes dissection or sentinel lymph node assessment, and neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by conization, have shown encouraging results. In this chapter, we discuss the role of conservative surgery in the management of early-stage cervical cancer focusing on obstetrical and oncological outcomes.