Purpose We sought to assess the impact of prostate size on operative difficulty as measured by estimated blood loss (EBL), operating room (OR) time and positive surgical margins (SM) and secondarily to assess the impact on biochemical recurrence (BCR) and the functional outcomes of potency and continence at one year following radical prostatectomy (RP) as well as postoperative bladder neck contracture (BNC). Materials and Methods During 1998–2007, 3067 men underwent RP by one of 5 dedicated prostate surgeons with no neoadjuvant or adjuvant therapy. Pathologic specimen weight was used as a measure of prostate size. Cox proportional hazards and logistic regression analysis was used to study the association between specimen weight and biochemical recurrence (BCR) and SM status, respectively, controlling for adverse pathologic features. Continence and potency were analyzed controlling for age, nerve-sparing status, and surgical approach. Results With increasing prostate size, there was increased EBL (p=0.013) and OR time (p=0.004) and a decrease in positive SM (84/632 (14%) for ≤40g, 99/862 (12%) for 41–50g, 78/842 (10%) for 51–65g, 68/731 (10%) for >65g (p<0.001)). BCR was observed in 186 of 2882 patients followed postoperatively and was not significantly associated with specimen weight (p=0.3). Complete continence was observed in 1165/1422 (82%) and potency in 425/827 (51%) at one year. Specimen weight was not significantly associated with potency (p=0.8), continence (p=0.08) or BNC (p=0.22). Conclusions Prostate size does not appear to affect biochemical recurrence or one-year functional results. However, EBL and OR time increased with larger prostate size and positive SM are more often observed in smaller glands.

We consider local martingales $M$ with jumps larger than $a$ for some $a$ larger than or equal to -1, and prove Novikov-type criteria for the corresponding exponential local martingale to be a uniformly integrable martingale. We obtain criteria using both the quadratic variation and the predictable quadratic variation. We prove optimality of the coefficients in the criteria. As a corollary, we obtain a verbatim extension of the classical Novikov criterion for continuous local martingales to the case of local martingales with nonnegative jumps

We give sufficient criteria for the Doléans-Dade exponential of a stochastic integral with respect to a counting process local martingale to be a true martingale. The criteria are adapted particularly to the case of counting processes and are sufficiently weak to be useful and verifiable, as we illustrate by several examples. In particular, the criteria allow for the construction of for example nonexplosive Hawkes processes as well as counting processes with stochastic intensities depending on diffusion processes.

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