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You are a middle-aged urologist. You have worked hard for 30-plusyears and you are not enjoying the business side of medicine.However, you do enjoy taking care of patients and enjoy coming tothe office and doing office procedures. What are your options?

Payers have specific forms, phone numbers, and/or addresses thatmust be used for appeals

Urologists counseling men with newly diagnosed prostate canceroften assess the risk posed by the disease in order to recommend anappropriate treatment strategy. During the past decade, clinicianshave recognized that men with elevated PSA levels have asignificant chance of harboring extracapsular disease. Anotherindicator of potentially advanced disease is the number of biopsycores that are positive for disease and the percentage of each corethat contains disease.

Vancouver, British Columbia-A study comparing continuousandrogen deprivation therapy (CAD) with intermittent androgendeprivation therapy (IAD) in prostate cancer post-prostatectomypatients with PSA found no statistically significant difference inprogression-free survival between the two treatment arms.

Vancouver, British Columbia-Predicting off-treatment time forintermittent androgen suppression is complex and involves manyfactors, said Laurence Klotz, MD, chief, division of urology,Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Center in Toronto.

Baltimore-Patients with small, lower-grade prostate cancerswho opt to delay surgery are no more likely to progress toincurable disease than are those who choose immediate intervention,say investigators from the Johns Hopkins University School ofMedicine here.

Vancouver, British Columbia-A combination of intermittentandrogen ablation and finasteride (Proscar) appears to slow tumorgrowth and improve survival time compared with continuous androgenablation (CAA) and intermittent androgen ablation (IAA) strategies,according to findings of an animal study conducted at NorthwesternUniversity, Chicago. Researchers found that mice treated with IAAplus finasteride were three to five times more likely to survivefor 70 days from start of treatment than were those in the othertreatment groups.

Bethesda, MD-A 2005 study from the large-scale, NIH-sponsoredWomen's Health Initiative (WHI) found that not only does hormonetherapy not relieve urinary incontinence in postmenopausal women,but estrogen (when taken alone) also doubles the risk ofincontinence in women who did not have it before they startedtherapy.

Washington-Lawmakers in many states across the nation areconsidering legislation that could directly affect the practices ofurologists and other physicians, urologists who attended aWashington legislative conference in March were told.

Houston-Socioeconomic status correlates strongly withmortality in older American men with local/regional stage prostatecancer and is a major factor contributing to the disparity insurvival between African-Americans and Caucasians, according to theresults of a study published recently in Cancer (2006;106:1276-85).

San Francisco-A prospective analysis of more than 4,600 menindicates that the insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) gene appearsto play a role in prostate cancer development and carcinogenesis,according to a recently published study (J Natl Cancer Inst 2006;98:123-34).

Iowa City, IA-A neural network that takes into accountmaternal age, sperm retrieval technique, type of sperm used, andtype of male factor has been found to be clinically useful forpredicting the outcome of in vitro fertilization/intracytoplasmicsperm injection.

Charlottesville, VA-Using sophisticated technology forbiomarker identification, researchers at the University ofVirginia, in collaboration with industry partners, have developed adiagnostic test that offers high specificity for discriminatingbladder cancer from a variety of non-cancerous urologic conditionsthat are common mimics of bladder cancer.

Bethesda, MD-In the largest randomized clinical trial ofcalcium and vitamin D in postmenopausal women, researchers havefound that women taking calcium with vitamin D supplementation had17% more kidney stones than did women on placebo.

Pfizer, Inc. has entered into an agreement with Schwarz Pharma AGunder which Pfizer will acquire worldwide rights to fesoterodine, anew drug candidate for the treatment of overactive bladder.

TargetScan, a new device that provides a stationary probe to eliminate prostate movement during certain prostate cancer treatments, will now be distributed to physicians nationwide through an exclusive agreement between Envisioneering Medical Technologies, the product?s developer, and BrachySciences.

Quinolones have surpassed sulfas as the most common class of antibiotics prescribed for isolated outpatient UTI in women, and this growth raises concerns about increases in resisitance, suggest the authors of an article published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (2006; 166:635-9).

One-fourth of men who undergo vasectomies forego having their semen tested to determine the procedure?s effectiveness, according to a Cleveland Clinic study.

Shock wave lithotripsy appears to significantly increase the risk for diabetes and hypertension later in life, according to Mayo Clinic researchers.

In women who undergo surgery to correct pelvic organ prolapse, adding a bladder-supporting Burch colposuspension to the operation helps to prevent stress incontinence after the surgery, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (2006; 354:1557-66)

A discovery about how a faulty gene predisposes a cell to cancerouschanges could pave the way for new treatments to block kidneycancer growth, suggests a study by researchers from the UnitedKingdom.

High cholesterol levels appear to be related to prostate cancer, and the association may be somewhat stronger in men diagnosed with hypercholesterolemia before 50 years of age and in those older than 65 years, according to a study by Italian researchers

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This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, selected the Interstitial Cystitis Association as its partner to manage and direct a 5-year campaign to increase awareness of interstitial cystitis among health care providers and patients.

Valera Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has completed its acquisition of the new drug application and other assets associated with valrubicin (Valstar), an FDA-approved drug indicated for treatment of carcinoma in situ (CIS) of the bladder.

This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, selected the Interstitial Cystitis Association as its partner to manage and direct a 5-year campaign to increase awareness of interstitial cystitis among health care providers and patients.

A drug typically used to treat osteoporosis has a potential clinical benefit in treating men with prostate cancer, according to researchers at the Louis Warschaw Prostate Cancer Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles.

Bladder cancer patients whose surgery was delayed more than 3 months after diagnosis were more likely to die from their disease than were patients whose surgery was performed sooner, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ann Arbor.