Radical Prostatectomy: Biochemical recurrence and prognostic factors

Abstract

The November-December 2013 issue of the International Braz J Urol presents original contributions with a lot papers in different fields. The papers come from many different countries such as Brazil, USA, Iran, France, Italy and Korea, and as usual the editor´s comment highlights some papers. In this number we can observe some papers about prognostic factors and recurrence in patients submitted to radical prostatectomy. This surgery is perhaps the most interesting surgery for the urologist and this topic is always up to date. Doctor Noronha and colleagues, from the Departments of Urology and pathology, from the state university of Campinas, Brazil performed on page 779 an interesting study in 400 patients about controversial clinicopathologic predictors of biochemical recurrence after radical prostatectomy and concluded that young patients and non-whites were not significantly associated with time to biochemical recurrence. The higher predictive value of Gleason score 4 + 3 = 7 vs. 3 + 4 = 7 discloses the importance of grade 4 as the predominant pattern. Most tumor extent evaluations on needle biopsies are predictive of time to biochemical recurrence however maximum percentage of cancer in all cores was the strongest predictor. Doctor de Nunzio and colleagues from the University of Florence, Italy performed on page 793 a clinical study in prostatic cancer to explore the association between serum levels of Sex Hormone Binding Glo-bulin (SHBG) and the risk of developing prostate cancer (PCa) as well as high grade disease in men undergoing prostate biopsy and concluded that in this cohort of patients, serum levels of SHBG are not predictive of PCa or high grade disease. According to our experience SHBG should not be considered a biomarker in PCa diagnosis neither a marker for high grade disease. Doctor da Silva and colleagues from the