Blogs@BJUI

The Urology Foundation Cycle Challenge in Rajasthan 19 – 28 November 2015 In memory of Professor John Fitzpatrick         After the gruelling cycling challenges in Sicily, Malawi, Madagascar, Patagonia, and most recently South Africa, which together have raised many hundreds of thousands of pounds for The Urology Foundation (TUF), our next Challenge is a 500 Km ride through Rajasthan, India. We now have 50 intrepid cyclists signed up and ready to participate…

This month's edition features three interesting papers in the field of functional urology. Overactive bladder (OAB) syndrome has a prevalence of 14%, prostatitis symptoms have a prevalence in the male population of 8.2% and a substantial number of all men undergoing radical prostatectomy will remain incontinent. These are clinical entities that every urologist encounters in his daily practice. The treatment of refractory OAB symptoms with anticholinergics, can be optimized by adding…

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” - Friedrich Nietzsche The EAU guidelines on lower urinary tract symptoms have been published recently.  These contain 36,000 words.  It was pointed out to me that the American declaration of independence contained 1300 words and The Ten Commandments just 179 words. The challenge was therefore to write ten commandments for urology in 179 words.  The rules I set were that I should write them whilst keeping  the…

This blog was first posted at https://www.symplur.com/blog/the-urology-tag-ontology-project/   Urologists have been on the forefront of harnessing Social Media for professional use. Urological Organizations and Journals have used Social Media to lower barriers for information dissemination [1,2] [3] [4]. Meanwhile, Social Media engagement at Urological meetings has been used to augment the experience of attendees and allow remote “attendance” for those not able to physically be…

Intraoperative in vivo tracking of a periprostatic nerve with multiphoton microscopy in rat model. In the last 6 months, the BJUI editorial team has evaluated an average of 59 urological oncology papers per month with an average acceptance rate of 16%. We receive additional papers for our ‘Translational Science’ section. Studies with high-quality methods are given the highest priority. Other papers compete well if they are highly applicable to clinical practice (i.e. comparative,…

Here is a fun campaign which should appeal to anyone interested in rugby or prostate cancer for that matter. The 2015 Rugby World Cup kicks off in England and Wales next month and as part of their warm up schedule, Australia are playing USA Rugby in a friendly match at Soldier Field in Chicago on the 5th of September. As part of their sponsorship of this fixture, Astellas are supporting a social media campaign called #pass4prostate which will directly raise funds for prostate cancer research in both…

Just a few years ago whilst operating, I was curious to find out about one of our unit's patients on the ward. We still had a bit of time to go in the current case, a retroperitoneal lymph node dissection. There was a chance the patient on the ward would require surgery and being at that time of the day an earlier 'heads up' is always best. One of the theatre staff kindly paged our resident. It was 5.05pm. No response. The other resident who was scrubbed directed them to get the resident's mobile…

Chemotherapy comes alive for prostate cancer! Systemic therapy for metastatic prostate cancer has radically changed in the last 10 years with the introduction of several novel agents that have shown significant improvements in progression free and overall survival. These have all been studied in metastatic castrate refractory prostate cancer (mCRPC) and have improved overall survival but in each case by less than 6 months. (The latest major breakthrough is the introduction of a relatively old drug,…

Several new surgical technologies have been assessed during the last decades in order to improve the management of LUTS (Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms): HoLEP (Holmium laser enucleation of the prostate), HoLAP (Holmium laser ablation of the prostate), TUMT (transurethral microwave therapy), TUNA (transurethral needle ablation), HIFU (high-intensity frequency ultrasound) and more recently Greenlight laser vaporization. All these techniques have been compared to TURP (transurethral resection of the…