UMMMM..i\'m not going here!!

Cynthia,

If you sign up for UroToday (just click the link and it will take you to a login screen where you can join for free) you can see the title, the article, and the names.

First sign up. Then come back to this site and click on Pat's original link. It will then take you directly to the abstract.

In my opinion, it is a crap study though with insufficient data presented and way overly general.

Mike

Hi!

Hey, can someone post the title of the study? (Also, last named--spelled correctly of one of the authors)?

I can find it easily in some databases that I have access to.

I was trying to interpret the gist of the article through the clues in your posts and responses.

Does this article have to do with a particular R/C longevity study? (Again...I may be way off).

I know, I know...I can register...but I'm soooo weary of the regiestering process. I also get BC alerts (which includes UroToday). I'll go see if I can see anything there.

I'm really curious now!

Cynthia2

Thanks Sara Anne! Good to know it's not just me!

You know, if they could give me their raw data, add in the years from 1999 through 2010, I'll bet I could now load all that up into Excel and create some nifty pivot tables that could possibly show some insightful information from the data. LOL!

It's like when you read "side effects" on drug information sheets. Is there such a thing as a drug (including placebo) that does not have headaches, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, weight gain, weight loss, dizziness, etc., listed as possible side effects?

When they do the testing, people report ANY change they experience during the testing period and who knows what was truly related to the medication as opposed to "just happened to happen at the same time as they were taking the medication (or placebo)"?

Kind of the same thing with the general category of "complications related to a cystectomy". Without categorizing those into mild, moderate, severe, very severe, what good is the data?

Oh well...
These guys all have to (as you often say) "publish or perish" so some amount of garbage publications are certainly going to be out there. Thing is, these things should get scored by some independent group (to avoid "I'll give you good marks on your paper if you'll do the same for me") and drivel like this one should go into the category of "Useless paper that raises more questions about the competence of the author(s) than anything else".

Oh well...

It was fun critiquing it anyway.

Mike

They don't say what they died of in the article. I'm not sure what this really tells us. Could it be they are doing lots of cystectomies on people who didn't have long to live anyway?

I hate when these guys publish studies just to publish studies. Maybe I'm reading wrong but if people tend to get cystectomies (on average) when they are a bit older, then it would seem important to know if they died of bladder cancer anyway or if they were hit by a truck or died of a heart attack or what have you.

Also, how severe were the complications? Bowel complication can be from "I seem to have to poop more often than before" or "I seem to be more sensitive to dairy products" up to "I've needed sixteen more surgeries on my bowels because the stinking surgeon screwed up and attached my bowels to other organs and forget to sew me up".

With 80% of the patients dying at a mean time of 4.1 years (range 0.1 to 28.1) that doesn't sound like a very good statistic at all. But then again, how many of that population died of bladder cancer?

Hmmmmm....

I might be missing the point of the study, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it's supposed to be saying.
Maybe it's because I've been neck deep in excel spreadsheets and pivot tables for the last week and my eyes are in upside down. Probably best to not try to figure these articles out when I'm kind of brain dead. I wonder if the guys who did the study would consider that to be a complication of cystectomy also. I'm pretty sure it's from messing around with too many numbers in too many spreadsheets for too many days, but what do I know? I'm not a research doctor.

Mike