Blogs@BJUI

The fact that Otis Brawley describes the new PSA testing guidelines of the American Urological Association (AUA) as “wonderful”, should immediately raise a red flag at AUA headquarters. Dr Brawley, Chief Medical Officer of the American Cancer Society, and the most vocal anti-prostate cancer screening voice in the USA over the past decade, has enthusiastically welcomed the new document and “commended” the AUA for bringing its policy closer to that of his Society. The Guidelines have also been…

The history of surgical enucleation for BPH dates back over 100 years and it continues to be the most complete and efficient method of removing adenomata of any size. The popularity and performance of the open approach has declined recently but new enucleation techniques have emerged. In this edition of the journal, Geavlete et al. have studied a recent addition to the endoscopic enucleation armamentarium, namely ‘plasma-button’ bipolar enucleation (BPEP). This procedure is a variation on…

Greetings from San Diego, California! The annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) is underway with over 15,000 attendees converging on this beautiful city from around the world. As I arrived at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Friday and made my way through security I ran into roughly twenty of my colleagues from in and around Toronto getting ready to board the same plane. Canadians have attended this meeting in droves for as long as I can remember. Arriving in San…

Nobody could have really predicted the impact of Hurricane Sandy, which struck Manhattan on October 29, 2012. If you told us a year ago that a hurricane would shut down all of New York City for weeks and that the hospital would be closed for months, we never would have believed it. Six months later, things still have not completely returned to normal. It all began on what seemed like an ordinary Friday afternoon, as we hurried between clinical duties and research meetings to get some semblance of…

The ‘Gleason Grading System’ first proposed by Donald Gleason in 1966 was a revolutionary system for its time. As it advocated the use of a sum score that combined the two most common patterns of prostate cancer seen in a radical prostatectomy specimen to predict the biological outcome of the tumour, rather than the worst pattern that was in common usage with other tumour types, it was truly innovative. Furthermore, although several other classification systems for prostate cancer have been…

In this paper, Bennett et al. [1] report the effects of an anti-androgen drug on autophagy and the subsequent impact on response to androgen-deprivation therapy alone or combined with exiting chemotherapeutic treatments. With an estimated 238,590 newly diagnosed cases and 29,720 deaths for 2013 in the USA, prostate cancer is, after skin cancer, the second most common cancer in men. Although the disease initially responds well to therapy, the cancer recurs in most patients within 1–2 years…

The BJUI has always promoted the best in basic science through its ‘Investigative Urology’ section. However, the new editorial team noticed a small problem – these articles were rarely cited, probably because they were rarely read. As we started speaking to our readers, the truth became rapidly obvious. Most urologists, being clinicians, could not understand the scientific content of these articles. Here was a major challenge. How were we going to attract our surgical readership to science? Whilst…

Dr Marni Basto & Dr Sarah Wilkinson G’day from the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Urological Society of Australia & New Zealand, easily identified globally this week using its hashtag, #USANZ13. This year’s meeting has taken place in Melbourne – the city of lane-way lattes, sport, lifestyle and culinary delights!  It has certainly been a jam-packed four days of academic content led by a stellar International Faculty - 23 key opinion leaders from every corner of the globe covering…

The bladder and bowel are functionally related organs; they lie in close proximity, have similar innervations and some structural similarities, albeit having different functional characteristics; they are both critical for the storage, collection and expulsion of waste products. Several previous clinical reports have suggested that LUTS, such as overactive bladder syndrome (OAB), can occur concurrently with disorders of the colon, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). In the study entitled…