Tag Archive for: David Quinlan

You are here: / David Quinlan

Posts

Annual meeting of the Irish Society of Urology

/2 Comments/by

A wonderful ISU meeting in a stunning setting with exquisite weather in my home county, Wicklow.  Great talks and posters from our Residents, but it was the audience discussion they prompted that made this such a stellar meeting.  Tremendous senior academic input from the Members of the Urological Club of Great Britain and Ireland as well as Guest Speakers Ian Eardley from Leeds and Mike Naslund from the University of Maryland and BAUS President Adrian Joyce.  Excellent back and forth discussion on Surgical Training, Urological Emergencies, Prostate Biopsy Sepsis, Incidentalomas, creating Centres of Excellence for Testis and Penile Cancer and (of course!) the Search for the Truth About Robots.  

Basic Science topics were of a very high standard with Boyce et al promising a blood test of 4 proteins that was far better than the Partin tables!!  Professor Mike Naslund made the complex so simple for us to understand in his talk on Health Care Economics – the take home message being that when you create a system where the patient is not personally out of pocket in accessing health care, you cannot control the costs.  Ian Eardley spoke on “Men vs Health”, enumerated all of the increased risks to the male from Metabolic Syndrome and concluded with the premise that the specialty best suited to drive forth the Men’s Health agenda is Urology.  Most felt that it was one of the best meetings they had been to because it was all about common garden topics they encounter in everyday practice and not the esoteric topics that tend to dominate the larger meetings.  So, come mid-Atlantic in Killarney Co Kerry for the ISU 2014 Meeting on the 25th and 26th of September with Guest Speakers Craig Peters from the US and Prokar Dasgupta from the UK!!!!

 

Dr David Quinlan
Consultant Urologist, St Vincent’s Hospital,
Senior Lecturer, University College Dublin
Chairman, BJUI

Twitter: @daithiquinlan

Fish Oils and Prostate Cancer

/11 Comments/by

If a Blog can be a call for help, then this is it! Since the recent high-profile paper in JNCI (https://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/07/09/jnci.djt174.abstract) suggesting that Omega 3 supplements increase the risk of Prostate Cancer and induce high grade prostate cancer, I am plagued by patient and colleague concerns about whether or not men should stop taking Omega 3 supplements! I know that health care providers all over the world have been similarly inundated. What are we to say to our patients?

Let us first look at the paper. The authors used data collected as part of the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) to determine whether men with high levels of plasma phospholipid fatty acids (high levels of which are present in fish oil supplements), namely long-chain ω-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids ([LCω-3PUFA], were at higher risk of developing prostate cancer. The case subjects in the study were 834 men diagnosed with prostate cancer, of whom 156 had high-grade cancer. The comparison cohort consisted of 1393 men selected randomly at baseline and matched to case subjects on age and race. Proportional hazards models estimated hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for associations between fatty acids and prostate cancer risk overall and by grade. The results? Compared with men in the lowest quartiles of LCω-3PUFA, men in the highest quartile had increased risks for low-grade (HR = 1.44, 95% CI = 1.08 to 1.93), high-grade (HR = 1.71, 95% CI = 1.00 to 2.94), and total prostate cancer (HR = 1.43, 95% CI = 1.09 to 1.88). These results are strong enough for the authors to conclude that there is increased prostate cancer risk among men with high blood concentrations of these plasma phospholipid fatty acids, and that “the consistency of these findings suggests that these fatty acids are involved in prostate tumorigenesis”.

Crikey! Fish oil supplements increase risk of prostate cancer! Is it really so?? Is the study methodology robust enough to change practice? Undoubtedly, there are a lot of patients taking these supplements, some prescribed by medical practitioners; even my lovely ophthalmologist wife tells me that nearly every patient with macular degeneration worldwide is on it! My knowledge of antioxidants is somewhat pedestrian and I feel like an amateur in advising whether or not men should discontinue Omega 3 supplements.

What should we tell those who ask us? All comments gratefully received.

Dr David Quinlan
Consultant Urologist, St Vincent’s Hospital,
Senior Lecturer, University College Dublin
Chairman, BJUI

Twitter: @daithiquinlan

BJUI at USICON

/2 Comments/by

BJUI had a very successful meeting at USICON in Pune. The hospitality was superb and a very well organised meeting. BJUI was represented by myself as Chairman of the Executive and by Prof Prokar Dasgupta as our new Editor. Prokar and his USICON counterparts put on a superb three hour symposium on how to organise a research project for publication. This symposium was extremely well attended with a vigorous interaction with the audience – it was very lively. In addition, Prokar had a significant input into a symposium on robotic prostatectomy as well as other scientific areas. Clearly, USICON were very pleased to see such an input into the USI from the BJUI and our attendance seemed to re-invigorate the relationship.

David Quinlan is Chairman of the BJU International Charity; Consultant Urologist at St Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin; Senior Lecturer in Surgery at University College, Dublin, Ireland.

BJUI Editor-in-Chief Prokar Dasgupta with Drs Rane, Kochikar and Patel at USICON

 

Comments on this blog are now closed.

 

© 2024 BJU International. All Rights Reserved.