Very few factors may be identified as prognostic for patients with bladder cancer undergoing radical cystectomy. Recently, detection of circulating tumor cells has shown to be very promising in anticipating both the likelyhood of distant metastases and survival in patients with breast cancer, melanoma, prostate cancer and other malignancies. In the present study we both tested the detection rate of circulating tumor cells using a PCR based methodology in the peripheral blood of patients undergoing radical cystectomy, and we further correlated our results with their clinical outcome.