BERKELEY, CA (UroToday.com) - Bladder cancers are the second most common urological malignancy in the Western world, with an estimated 70 530 new cases diagnosed each year in the USA.(1)
Most diagnosed patients (75-85%) present with non-muscle invasive disease, which is characterised by a probability of recurrence and progression at 5 years of 31-78% and 1-45%, respectively.(2) Early diagnosis and postoperative monitoring of bladder cancer is beneficial to improve patient prognosis(3) because detecting bladder cancer earlier may decrease the rate of progression.(4)
Screening, as well as follow-up of patients with bladder cancer, is usually performed by urinary cytology as an adjunct to cystoscopy. Urine cytology has advantages compared with expensive and invasive cystoscopy procedures. Although urine cytology is highly sensitive in the recognition of high-grade urothelial carcinomas, urine cytology has poor sensitivity in low-grade bladder tumours.(5) In addition, urine cytology has poor inter- and intra-observer reproducibility.(6) Cystoscopy is the ‘gold standard’ method for diagnosing bladder cancer and is also used in the surveillance of patients with a history of bladder cancer.(3) However, this method is an invasive and costly procedure, may miss small papillary tumours and carcinoma in situ, and may be over used particularly in patients with low-grade disease...View or save the full text Mini Review as a .pdf file
| What’s known on the subject? and What does the study add? Although many tests for identifying patients with new or recurrent bladder cancer have been used, a reliable method has yet to be established. Recently, increasing attention has focused on the role of survivin in bladder cancer detection. Because urine survivin tests have better sensitivity than cytology, urine survivin could potentially replace routine cytology and might be used as an adjunct method for cystoscopy. However, the clinical utility of urine survivin as a bladder tumour marker identifi ed in the present study remains to be elucidated. |
Ja Hyeon Ku,*† Guilherme Godoy,* Gilad E. Amiel,*‡ and Seth P. Lerner*
*Scott Department of Urology, Baylor College of Medicine, and ‡M ichael E. Debakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Houston, TX, USA, and †Department of Urology, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
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