Quality has no boundaries
The new year has arrived bringing with it new expectations of success. It gives us the opportunity to reflect on 2013 and plan for the year ahead. We hope you enjoyed the new web journal www.bjui.org that we have introduced. It has certainly increased our full paper downloads each month which means that our readers do care. Thank you! Your loyalty makes the many hours of hard work – 24/7 – all worthwhile. We have an international team which allows someone, somewhere to be making constant improvements…
Editorial: Circumcision – follow-up or not?
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There is an excellent study from Uganda in this issue of the BJUI [1]. It looks at the rate of healing of men undergoing prophylactic circumcision. Some had HIV; others not. What they termed ‘complete wound healing’ was an intact scar without a scab, sutures or a sinus – effectively a ‘sealed’ wound. There are several useful data therein:
all men had healed by 6 weeks; the median being 4 weeks.
HIV status did not appear to delay wound healing, even with low CD4 counts.
the…
Editorial: Too many men still undergo needless prostate biopsy
Multiple studies have shown that only one in three or four men with a raised PSA level prove to have prostate cancer and many men suffer potentially life-threatening complications from transrectal prostate biopsy. There is an urgent need for better risk stratification of men with elevated PSA levels. Any such test should have a high negative predicative value (NPV; small number of significant cancers missed) but also a high positive predictive value (PPV; i.e. the yield would be high and there would…
The Bengal Urological Society’s Golden Jubilee
We recently celebrated the Bengal urological Society’s Golden jubilee!
Earlier known as the “Calcutta Urology Association”, the society was founded in the year 1963 and is the oldest urological society in India. My guess is that it is probably one of the oldest societies that aimed to establish a separate existence of urology. What’s your take on that?
It was a privilege to have Prof Prokar Dasgupta with us for this event. The demonstration of the robotic surgery by the master himself…
Editorial: Diabetes mellitus and non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer: not just a coincidence?
Urologists are familiar with the plethora of comorbidities affecting patients with bladder cancer. Many are smoking-related, such as respiratory disease, ischaemic heart disease and peripheral vascular disease. Other conditions are associated with an ageing, increasingly obese population. Rieken et al. [1], present intriguing observations suggesting an association between diabetes mellitus (DM), its treatment and the prognosis of non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). In a retrospective,…
The Spirit of Christmas
It’s that festive time of year when everything in London seems to be subsumed by the preparations for Christmas festivities. I thought therefore that it might be appropriate to devote a few thoughts to the sadly departed Tim Christmas, the outstanding surgeon and urologist to the Charing Cross and Royal Marsden Hospitals who died two years ago and always loved his namesake festivities. Tim and I go back a long way. He was a medical student at the Middlesex Hospital in London when I was a trainee,…
Editorial: Minimally invasive surgical training: do we need new standards?
The pan-European survey conducted by Furriel et al. [1] in this issue of BJUI is a timely address of a hot topic in urology.
More than 20 years have passed since the first laparoscopic nephrectomy was performed by Clayman et al. [2] in 1991, and now all urological major interventions have been performed with one or more different minimally invasive techniques (standard, single-site or robot-assisted laparoscopy); some of them have passed the judgment of time becoming ‘gold standard’…
Beyond our wildest dreams
In this podcast Prokar Dasgupta summarises the success of the BJUI over 2013. For more on podcasts, including how to record your own, go to Podcasts Made Simple.
If anyone had suggested to me in January 2013 that our full article downloads would increase by 15% and the Melbourne Consensus Statement on PSA testing would be viewed over 5000 times @ BJUI.org, I would have stared at them in disbelief. The launch of our web portal in addition to an innovative paper journal, has achieved…
Would you really do a radical prostatectomy on a man with known metastatic prostate cancer?
This year’s final #urojc concluded with intense discussions on the role of local treatment (LT) in metastatic prostate cancer. One study author, @mbwilliams95 joined the conversation to provide valuable insights.
Despite the fact only a small number of Stage IV patients had LT between 2004-2010 (post docetaxel era), this population based study revealed statistically significant differences between overall survival (OS) and disease specific survival (DSS).
Treatment
Patient…
Headline news: “Doctors and nurses may face jail for neglect”?
It has been an important few weeks in for doctors in the United Kingdom, sensationalist headlines have been on the front pages of many of the national newspapers: “Doctors and nurses may face jail for neglect”
This has all stemmed for the publication of the Francis report and Berwick review into patient safety. They detail recommendations on how the National Health Service (NHS) can learn and improve the standard of patient safety. The Berwick report was led by Professor Don Berwick, an international…