I've long been suspicious of "regret" as an endpoint. This is principally because decisional regret is predicated on the (improbable) understanding of outcome under the counterfactual. New paper shows regret is basically explained by "I had a bad outcome". pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42429300/

Function drives 1-year decision regret in radical prostatectomy: a multicentre prospective study - PubMed

Surgical decision regret after RP is primarily driven by postoperative functional outcomes rather than oncological results or surgical approach. Optimising functional recovery and managing patient exp...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Hiring right now and the surnames on our shortlist have the following origins: Jewish, Chinese, Irish, West African, East European, English, South Asian, Spanish. What a joy to live in a country where we get so many different histories and perspectives.

Hasn’t it been amazing to see teams from the minor footballing countries doing so well at the world cup, even if they come up short? I refer to Morocco, Egypt, Cape Verde and, of course, England.

When I report that I am doing a randomized trial, this is in distinction to a study with non-randomized or historical controls. But when a researcher claims to be analyzing "real world data", this is in distinction to what exactly?

Looking for the best papers on the positive and negative likelihood ratio for prostate MRI. What is LR+ and LR- separately for PIRADS 3, 4 and 5? Problem is, this can only be derived from a study where everyone had a biopsy or long-term follow-up.

Has anyone been noticing folks are starting to say "numerically superior" to describe results that are not statistically significant?

Can someone explain to be how, in meta-analysis, leave-one-out methodology, has anything to do with exploring the sources of heterogeneity?

One of my true heroes. She managed to find a work around to a catch-22 that male doctors had created to prevent women becoming doctors.

Admirable Women@admirablewomen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Physician & suffragist Elizabeth Anderson was born #OTD in 1836. She was the: * First woman to qualify in the UK as a physician & surgeon & first MD in France * Co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women * First dean of a British medical school * First female mayor in the #UK #WomenInSTEM

Lots of interesting arguments against removing "cancer" label from pattern 3 prostate disease. For instance, pattern 3 involves basal cells & often has PTEN loss. Question now is whether these are a hill worth other people dying on. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Prostate Cancer Mortality After Relabeling Low-Grade Prostate Cancer as Precancerous

This decision analytical model study evaluates the effects of relabeling grade group 1 prostate cancer on prostate cancer mortality in the US.

jamanetwork.com

"Due to low sensitivity, PSMA-PET/CT without evidence of nodal disease does not obviate the need for PLND" BUT "PSMA-avid nodal disease portends ... nearly inevitable ... recurrence / progression, supporting treatment intensification." bjui-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Diagnostic and prognostic utility of PSMA‐PET/CT in node‐metastatic prostate cancer

Objective To measure the sensitivity of prostate-specific membrane antigen-positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PSMA-PET/CT) for detecting lymph node involvement (LNI) in patients under.....

bjui-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

PSA screening reduces cancer-specific mortality (PCSM). Questions remain about effect on all-cause (OS). PSA could reduce PCSM not OS only with deaths from other causes, eg complications of surgery. Please reply with list of screening-induced causes of death.

If the UK were a US state, how would it rank? It depends entirely on what you measure! Fascinating table showing a startlingly different picture depending on the choice of metric. Source: www.linkedin.com/posts/diogo-...

Analysis of the CAP randomized trials demonstrates prostate cancer overdiagnosis is highly age dependent. Opportunistic screening policies have led to most PSA tests being in older men. These policies should be revaluated. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.70492

Evaluating the Impact of Age on Prostate Cancer Overdiagnosis Using Long‐Term Follow‐Up From the CAP Randomised Trial

Uncertainty persists over whether the benefits of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening outweigh harms from overdiagnosis, a key barrier to population-wide adoption. Here, English male mortality ....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Accrual to cancer RCTs is very poor. Keeping the product (ie the trial) the same but changing the advertising has a very small effect doi.org/10.1002/cam4.... Alternatively , change the product pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39410769/: it is possible to rapidly accrue to large, single-center RCTs

Strategies for increasing accrual in cancer clinical trials: What is the evidence?

Introduction Despite the importance of clinical trial participation among cancer patients, few participate—and even fewer patients from ethnic and racial minoritized groups. It is unclear whether su.....

doi.org

Time to bring back a classic! I asked a journal editor for a date. She declined, but said I could date her sister if I paid $4,000.

Just saw geology undergraduate final presentations @carleton.edu Way better presentational, statistical and causal reasoning skills than at typical medical conferences. Why we aren’t teaching our fellows and residents better, given that, you know, lives are at stake?

Doing statistics well is hard. Avoiding egregious errors in analysis, reporting and interpretation isn't. Just read, understand and follow the guidelines. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32451178/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37286459/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40914655/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30580902/

Guidelines for Reporting of Figures and Tables for Clinical Research in Urology - PubMed

In an effort to improve the presentation of and information within tables and figures in clinical urology research, we propose a set of appropriate guidelines. We introduce six principles: (1) include graphs only if they improve the reader's ability to understand the study findings; (2) think throug …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Just submitted a paper to "Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews". Was asked by editor *before* they would peer review: my h-index ; all publications in past 12 months, along with impact factor of each journal in which they were published". #RealScience

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29404569/

Statistical Code for Clinical Research Papers in a High-Impact Specialist Medical Journal - PubMed

Statistical Code for Clinical Research Papers in a High-Impact Specialist Medical Journal

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez@frodsan.bsky.social · 5mo ago

97% of the papers archived the data but only 35% archived the code. Most people are writing code but not sharing it. Time to bring up this again: scispace.com/pdf/publish-... (and if the code isn't good enough yet, maybe it's too early to publish the paper) #openscience #reproducibility #ecopubs

If only AI / ML had been around when I was training, I wouldn’t have had to learn about things like causal inference, how to evaluate prediction models or even, say, the importance of data quality. What a waste of time all that was!

Any suggestions as to great resources (lectures on YouTube, short didactic papers etc), to teach novice researchers about RCTs? Design, endpoints, consent, eligibility criteria, IRB etc etc any and all of it.

COULD EVERYONE PLEASE STOP USING RANDOM EFFECTS META-ANALYSIS WHEN COMBINING 3 OR 4 TRIALS? AND COULD REVIEWERS STOP DEMANDING IT?

today.yougov.com/politics/art...

​​From millionaires to Muslims, small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans | YouGov

When it comes to estimating the size of demographic groups, Americans rarely get it right. In two recent YouGov polls, we asked respondents to guess the percentage (ranging from 0% to 100%) of America...

today.yougov.com

www.auajournals.org/doi/10.1097/... Lymph node dissection (LND) for radical prostatectomy: controversy about RCT, complication rate. Decision analysis puts numerical estimates on benefit, harm, uncertainty. Expected utility of LND was higher vs. no PLND across broad range of scenarios.

Decision Analysis of Pelvic Lymph Node Dissection During Radical Prostatectomy | Journal of Urology

Purpose:There is controversy about the decision of whether to perform a pelvic lymph node dissection (PLND) during radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer. While a recent randomized trial reported a...

auajournals.org

Yet again, PRS do not differentially distinguish aggressive from indolent cancer. & BARCODE RCT showed poor results compared to MRI etc. Yet the authors give a thumbs up to genomics in prostate cancer screening. When is the PRS fever going to break? www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Genomic risk model to implement precision prostate cancer screening in clinical care: the ProGRESS study - Nature Cancer

Vassy, Dornisch and colleagues developed a genomics-based prostate cancer risk model to support a randomized clinical trial of precision screening in a national healthcare system.

nature.com

Too many meta-analyses have findings equivalent to: “If you average the cost of a loaf of bread, car insurance for a year and a movie ticket, you get $752.36”

1) A covariate that is predictive of outcome should be in the model even if unpredictive of assignment (eg matched pairs design). 2) A covariate that is not predictive of outcome should not be in the model, even if predictive of assignment. 3) The propensity score is stupid.

When discussing PSA screening policy, we often contrast two options as opportunistic vs. population-based PSA screening. Would suggest a name change to disorganized vs. organized PSA screening.

Number of papers on PubMed using the term "real world data" in 2000: 6. Number in 2025: ~5000. Number of papers for which "real world data" would be a meaningful scientific term: 0.

@amit_sud PRS-based prostate cancer screening has worse properties than contemporary approaches: "BARCODE1 biopsied more men, diagnosed more low-grade PCs & detected fewer high-grade PCs versus Göteborg-2 and ProScreen." authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...