Increase in submissions to International Brazilian Journal of Urology during Covid-19 quarentine

Abstract

In times of Covid-19 quarentine we observed an increase in submissions around 38% to International Brazilian Journal of Urology, which is good news in these difficul times. The September-October number of Int Braz J Urol, the fifth under my supervision, presents original contributions with a lot of interesting papers in different fields: Prostate Cancer, Male Infertility, Female Incontinence, Renal Cell Carcinoma, Urinary Diversion, Hypospadia, Urinary Stones, Ureteral Cancer, myelomeningocele, and Testicular Cancer. The papers came from many different countries such as Brazil, USA, Turkey, China, Republic of Korea, Colombia, Spain and Canada, and as usual the editor´s comment highlights some of them. In the present issue we present three important papers about Prostate Cancer. Dr. Qin and colleagues from China performed in page 691 (1) a nice systematic review about the prostate cancer antigen 3 (PCA3) and suggested that PCA3 was a non-invasive method with the acceptable sensitivity and specificity in the diagnosis of Prostate cancer, to distinguish between patients and healthy individuals. Dr. Yingyi Qin and collegues from China presented in page 754 (2) a nice paper about perioperative outcomes between the robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP) and open radical prostatectomy (ORP) and shows that the RARP approach has lower incidence rates of perioperative complications than the ORP approach, and there is a potential decreasing tendency of complication incidence rates for the RARP. The editor in chief would like to highlight the following works too: Dr. Chavarriaga and collegues from Colombia (3) on page 743 evaluated the self-perception of health-related quality of life (HRQoL), ease of catheterization and global and cosmetic outcomes in patient's dependent on Mitrofanoff catheterization and concluded that continent urinary diversion is associated with good HRQoL, global satisfaction, ease and painless catheterization, adequate self-perception of cosmetic outcomes and a low complication rate, remaining a safe and viable option. Dr. Ko and Collegues (4) from Republic of Korea perfomed on page 778 a interesting study about the association between preoperative retrograde pyelography (RGP), conducted to evaluate upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC), and intravesical recurrence (IVR) after radical nephroureterectomy (RNU)

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the research activities of UK ophthalmologists

“…Alongside this, many enforced changes to ways of working, such as virtual meetings and greater flexibility during pauses in face-to-face clinical tasks appeared to have improved the ease and efficiency of certain research activities. These observations mirror the substantial rises in the rate at which manuscripts have been submitted to academic journals during the pandemic [ 19 – 21 ]. Aside from taking advantage of some aspects of more flexible working, a small number of ophthalmologists were also able to reframe their activities to include an aspect addressing questions specifically related to the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Impact of lifestyle in prostate cancer patients. What should we do?

“…Qin et al found that prostate cancer antigen 3 (PCA3) distinguishes healthy patients from patients with PCa; this biomarker is over--expressed in more than 95% of PCa cells. The influence of ethnicity on PCA3 is not clear; we need more studies to conclude differential diagnosis of PCa (9)(10)(11).…”