Blogs@BJUI

This year’s BAUS Annual Meeting was held in Manchester’s International Convention Centre and attended by almost 1200 delegates from all over the world. There has been a lot of anticipation this year following great attendance and atmosphere at the USANZ13, EAU13 and AUA13; much of the success and excitement coming from those conferences was echoed by the delegates on Twitter. This was my first BAUS conference and I was particularly excited about my place on a urology skills course using fresh…

19th June 2013 Sir, Laura Donnelly’s article (Daily Telegraph Sat 15th June) contains some factual inaccuracies. She estimates that if all men referred with suspected prostate cancer received an MRI scan prior to a prostate biopsy, a quarter of them could be reassured without the need for a biopsy. This is fundamentally misleading because as yet there is insufficient evidence to support this assertion. The article further claims that an initial MRI could halve the number of men who…

Although effective, current treatments of stress urinary incontinence (SUI) can be viewed as palliatives, as they do not regenerate the normal function of the urethral sphincter. Cell therapy pretends to do so. Mesenchymal-derived stem cells, isolated from bone marrow, striated muscle or fat have been investigated. Transurethral injection of striated muscle-derived stem cells (MDSCs) has been the most studied technique in human. Although results were encouraging, the need for pre-implantation…

We live in a world that is getting smaller mainly because of global friendship, the Internet and the ease of travel. The British contribution to this should be a matter of pride for every UK urologist. Many friends and colleagues say that the BJUI has gone global, a decision that was made during the editorship of Hugh Whitfield and promoted under John Fitzpatrick. It was the correct move and has allowed British urology to maintain its prominent position in the rapidly changing world of academic publishing. During…

Active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer is gaining increasing acceptance. Indeed, many would argue that it is now the primary management strategy for men who have little to gain from radical therapy but who may incur some harms. However, active surveillance is far from a perfect pathway. First, many men and their physicians find it unacceptable to not treat a known cancer. Second, the burden of follow-up with clinical examinations and serum PSA testing on both men and healthcare systems…

This month the Twitter-based International Urology Journal Club #urojc made a bold move away from cancer to discuss kidney stones. The paper entitled ‘Soda and other beverages and the Risk of Kidney Stones’ by Ferraro et al. was published online on 15th March 2013. Open access to the article was generously provided by the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. The lead author, Pietro Manuel Ferraro, was kind enough to actively participate within the Twitter discussion. This…

We are now in the last stages of preparation for this year’s British Association of Urologists (BAUS) Annual Meeting which takes place from 17th-20th June 2013 at Manchester Central. This year’s meeting features a long list of distinguished International speakers including the following:     Professor Elspeth McDougall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Dr Paul Turek, The Turek Clinic, San Francisco, USA Professor Simon Horenblas, The Netherlands…

After seventeen years as a practicing urologist and a further six in training, it amazes me that we still regard prostate cancer as a mystical science and view the issue of screening through the opaque prism of controversy. For so long it seems that the advanced stage disease that I learned about in the mid 1980s in medical school was irreversibly altered by early detection and treatment. Of course we now know that much of this early detection was simply a lead-time bias and that many men who were…

In the Institute of Medicine report published in 1999, it was estimated that 44 000–98 000 patients died annually from preventable medical errors. It was further reported that the annual burden on economy due to preventable medical errors was anywhere between 17–29 billion American dollars. In the USA federal budget 2000–2001, the entire federal resources devoted to general science, space and technology was 19.2 billion American dollars: ≈10 billion less than the cost of medical…