Blogs@BJUI

This month’s topic for the Twitter-based International Urology Journal Club #urojc was bladder cancer, with a paper titled ‘Unaltered oncological outcomes of radical cystectomy with extended lymphadenectomy over three decades’ by Zehnder et al, published online in July 2013. Open access to the paper was kindly provided by the BJUI.  Zehnder and colleagues undertook a retrospective analysis of the University of Southern California cohort and identified 1488 patients with muscle invasive…

The article by Ravindra et al., in this issue of the BJUI, tries to address an important question of comparing the 2 commonest types of botulinum toxin-A (BTX-A), Ona- and AbobotulinumtoxinA. In their institution they changed from OnbotulinumtoxinA to AbobotulinumtoxinA and thus compared results of their different case series for patients with overactive bladder syndrome. Very few studies have tried to address this issue for botulinum toxin-A use in the urinary tract and to my knowledge there are…

“You never have a second chance to make a first impression.”  How you initially come across to your colleagues, the nurses and your patients as a newly appointed consultant can set the tone for your consultancy for the rest of your career. Once an opinion (winner or loser) has been formed about you, it is virtually set in stone. It is much too important to leave these things to chance. In your first year you will either sink, float or swim!  ‘Thriving and Surviving as a new consultant’…

I was born in the ‘Eighties’. I was a teenager when the Internet first became accessible to the general public and a medical student when Facebook was launched in 2004. It seems improbable and surreal that my time spent ‘liking’ and ‘poking’ Facebook posts from college acquaintances would someday be of any use to my career and research. Indeed, ‘I was there’ at the very beginnings of social media, but I had little idea of what it would become. The social media revolution…

This blog was originally published as a comment article in BJU International, 112: 11–12. doi: 10.1111/j.1464-410X.2012.11780.x   With the explosion and expansion of information technology, instantaneous dissemination of medical knowledge across the globe is a reality and here to stay. Performing live surgery to an audience, whether to the medical community or to the general public, has raised much controversy and continues to be hotly debated even today. While a recent article by a very…

Surgical planning and access are important factors for successful stone-free outcomes in patients undergoing percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL); however, PCNL has a high risk of haemorrhagic complications (reported transfusion rates of up to 12%), which curtail surgery and result in suboptimum outcomes. Access to the pelvicalyceal system remains the major risk for bleeding, often associated with an off-set tract, splitting of the infundibulum/pelvis and/or angulated sheath, and requiring inordinate…

As this year’s Tour de France starts and we wonder if Chris Froome can take over from Sir Bradley this blog thinks about previous Tours with some sadness. As an oncologist treating testicular cancer the Tour used to be a reminder of one of the great successes of modern oncology. Seeing Lance Armstrong on the podium showed how chemotherapy can overcome even poor prognosis testicular cancer. Lance was an inspiration to our patients. I doubt there has been a happier sight on the chemotherapy day unit…

The Canadian Urological Association held its annual meeting in the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario from June 22-25, 2013. Traditionally this meeting signals the start of summer in Canada and after a prolonged cool and wet spring the hot weather arrived as everyone convened. The central location in our vast country assured that the meeting was well attended with attendance far exceeding expectations. Even though I probably have seen this place two dozen times since childhood the physical spectacle…

In recent years, efforts to reduce morbidity from lymphadenectomy for penile cancer were based on surgical procedures to reduce the area of lymph node dissection. The proposition of extensive video-endoscopic inguinal lymphadenectomy, a technique still experimental, is to reduce the morbidity of conventional surgery without affecting the maximum chance of oncological control of locoregional disease. Therefore the initiative of using the help of a robot to facilitate the implementation of this procedure…