0000000000273777
AUTHOR
Thomas M. Fandel
Intraoperative peripheral frozen sections do not significantly affect prognosis after nerve-sparing radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer
Study Type – Therapy (outcomes research) Level of Evidence 2b What’s known on the subject? and What does the study add? We hypothesized that taking intraoperative frozen section (FS) biopsies of the peripheral margins of resection during radical prostatectomy would allow an intraoperative systematic scan of resection margins. In the case of positive FS, extended resection could be performed with the aim of completely excising residual tumour, improving biochemical recurrence-free survival of patients with positive surgical margins at the inked specimen. To our knowledge, the prognostic value of achieving a negative resection status by systematically taking intraoperative FS of the periphera…
The effect of intracavernosal growth differentiation factor-5 therapy in a rat model of cavernosal nerve injury.
OBJECTIVE To determine whether the intracavernosal application of growth differentiation factor-5 (GDF-5) influences nerve regeneration and erectile function after cavernosal nerve injury in a rat model. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty-two male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into four equal groups: eight had a sham operation (uninjured controls), while 24 had bilateral cavernosal nerve crush. The crush-injury groups were treated at the time of injury with an impregnated collagen sponge implanted into the right corpus cavernosum. The sponge contained no GDF-5 (injured controls), 2 µg (low concentration), or 20 µg GDF-5 (high concentration). Erectile function was assessed by cavernosa…
Do we truly see what we think we see? The role of cognitive bias in pathological interpretation
In the histomorphological grading of prostate carcinoma, pathologists have regularly assigned comparable scores for the architectural Gleason and the now-obsolete nuclear World Health Organization (WHO) grading systems. Although both systems demonstrate good correspondence between grade and survival, they are based on fundamentally different biological criteria. We tested the hypothesis that this apparent concurrence between the two grading systems originates from an interpretation bias in the minds of diagnostic pathologists, rather than reflecting a biological reality. Three pathologists graded 178 prostatectomy specimens, assigning Gleason and WHO scores on glass slides and on digital im…
Cryopreservation of prostate cancer tissue during routine processing of fresh unfixed prostatectomy specimen: demonstration and validation of a new technique
BACKGROUND Most molecular techniques currently require fresh frozen tumor tissue, which in the case of prostatectomy specimen is a challenge to obtain for a variety of intrinsic reasons. Prostate cancers are usually located in the organ periphery and hence meticulous attention has to be paid to the relation between the tumor and the surgical margin. In this article we describe a new technique that allows to obtain fresh frozen tumor material in rather large quantities and without jeopardizing diagnostic accuracy. METHOD An inner triangle, representing roughly 50% of the entire prostate tissue, is removed from native prostatectomy specimen and cryopreserved, leaving the periphery of the orga…