Faculty Bibliography

Current guidelines recommend conservative management as the preferred option for most low-risk prostate cancer cases, with certain possible exceptions (age <55yr, African Americans, and high-volume grade group 1). Although previous studies have documented substantial heterogeneity in the uptake of conservative management, less is known about the underlying reason for this variation and whether it is due to guideline-concordant factors (age, race, and biopsy cancer volume). We explored variation in the use of conservative management for low-risk prostate cancer among 20 597 men diagnosed in the US Veterans Affairs health care system from 2010 to 2016. Conservative management increased substantially over this time from 51% to 76% (p< 0.001). However, there was substantial variation by facility (35-100%). Multivariable analysis revealed that patient factors included in the guidelines (e.g., age and biopsy cores), other patient factors (eg, marital status and PSA) and non-patient factors (eg, geographic region, case volume, year) were associated with conservative management use. In conclusion, even within an integrated health care system, there remains significant heterogeneity in the uptake of conservative management for low-risk prostate cancer. Both guideline-concordant factors and other factors not discussed in the guidelines were associated with conservative management use. PATIENT SUMMARY: In the US Veterans Affairs health care system the vast majority of men with low-risk prostate cancer were managed conservatively by 2016, although there was significant variation by facility. Patient factors specifically mentioned in guidelines had the greatest impact on prediction of conservative management.

The use of social media is growing rapidly in health care. The purpose of this study was to provide updated data on utilization of social media in urology. A survey was emailed to 19 840 American Urological Association (AUA) members in September 2017, and responses were compared to our previous survey in 2013. Overall, 74% of 1731 respondents have a social media account. Facebook and YouTube were the platforms most commonly used. However, use of Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest significantly increased. Among social media users, 33% agreed that it has impacted their practice, and one-third have followed a medical conference remotely. At the 2018 AUA meeting (#AUA18), there were 18,863 tweets from 3887 contributors, which achieved 73,878 million impressions, a significant increase since 2013. More than half of users were not familiar with professional guidelines on social media. The most common reasons for non-use were not seeing any value and not wanting invasion of privacy. In conclusion, social media use has increased substantially in urology, providing opportunities for global conference participation and influencing clinical practice for a substantial proportion of users. Professional standards for online conduct should be integrated into medical education as use of social media continues to increase. PATIENT SUMMARY: The use of social media in urology has increased over time. Although Facebook and YouTube are the platforms most commonly used, use of Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest has significantly increased over time. Use of social media at medical conferences has increased over time, and a substantial proportion of urologists reported that social media influenced their clinical practice.

Although there is a large amount of user-generated content about urological health issues on social media, much of this content has not been vetted for information accuracy. In this article, we review the literature on the quality and balance of information on urological health conditions on social networks. Across a wide range of benign and malignant urological conditions, studies show a substantial amount of commercial, biased and/or inaccurate information present on popular social networking sites. The healthcare community should take proactive steps to improve the quality of medical information on social networks. PATIENT SUMMARY: In this review, we examined the spread of misinformation about urological health conditions on social media. We found that a significant amount of the circulating information is commercial, biased or misinformative.

BACKGROUND:Little is known about the key composition of a successful tweet in urology. OBJECTIVE:To investigate for predictors of engagement with urology content on Twitter. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS/METHODS:This was a cross-sectional study based on 2-wk Twitter data surrounding a major international urology conference. INTERVENTION/METHODS:We examined the engagement for all original tweets containing the hashtags for the European Association of Urology conference ("#EAU19" and/or "#EAU2019"). OUTCOME MEASUREMENTS AND STATISTICAL ANALYSIS/UNASSIGNED:Study outcomes included engagement with tweets, as measured by the number of "likes" and "retweets." Tweet- and Twitter user-related parameters of each individual tweet were recorded. Multiple linear regression analyses were performed to investigate for predictors of likes and retweets. RESULTS AND LIMITATIONS/CONCLUSIONS:From March 9 to 22, 2019, there were a total of 37 222 tweets. Among them, 3534 were "original tweets" that had 31 889 likes and 10 031 retweets. On multivariable analysis, the word count, number of mentions, and presence of a photo were predictors of likes and retweets. An increasing number of hashtags were associated with fewer likes. The number of "followings" and "followers" of the contributor, and their time since joining Twitter did not have any associations with the number of likes or retweets. The major limitation of the study is the lack of assessment about the quality of the tweet content. CONCLUSIONS:Based on the Twitter data from a urology conference, we concluded that the word count, number of mentions, and presence of a photo within the tweet were associated with audience engagement. PATIENT SUMMARY/UNASSIGNED:We could engage the audience more successfully by increasing the number of words and mentions, and including a photo within a tweet. The results formulated the basic principles in creating successful tweets for sharing urological knowledge.

Data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) show that the Internet is the first place people go to when they need information about health or medical topics. Searches for online health information have both benefits and challenges for patient-physician communication. To fully appreciate these issues, it is important to understand the following: (1) who is going online; (2) why are they going; (3) where are they going; (4) what needs are being met; and (5) how, if at all, do they discuss health information found online with their doctors. The objective of this mini-review is to highlight contemporary issues regarding the impact of the internet on patient-physician communication and to present directions for future research. PATIENT SUMMARY: The growing use of the Internet has implications for people seeking information on health matters. Our review shows that the Internet can be helpful for patient-physician communication, but this depends on the quality of health information found and whether the information is discussed during medical visits.

Previous epidemiologic studies have examined the relationship between sleep disturbances with prostate cancer (PCa) risk and/or survival. However, less has been published about the impact of sleep disturbance on quality of life for PCa survivors and their caregivers. Although PCa presents numerous potential barriers to sleep (e.g. hot flashes, nocturia), current survivorship guidelines do not address sleep. In addition to its impact on quality of life, sleep disturbances also mediate the impact of cancer status on missed days from work and healthcare expenditures.

BACKGROUND:Social media coverage is increasingly used to spread the message of scientific publications. Traditionally, the scientific impact of an article is measured by the number of citations. At a journal level, this conventionally matures over a 2-year period, and it is challenging to gauge impact around the time of publication. OBJECTIVE:We, therefore, aimed to assess whether Web-based attention is associated with citations and to develop a predictive model that assigns relative importance to different elements of social media coverage: the #SoME_Impact score. METHODS:We included all original articles published in 2015 in a selection of the highest impact journals: The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature, Cell, and Science. We first characterized the change in Altmetric score over time by taking a single month's sample of recently published articles from the same journals and gathered Altmetric data daily from the time of publication to create a mixed effects spline model. We then obtained the overall weighted Altmetric score for all articles from 2015, the unweighted data for each Altmetric component, and the 2-year citation count from Scopus for each of these articles from 2016 to 2017. We created a stepwise multivariable linear regression model to develop a #SoME_Score that was predictive of 2-year citations. The score was validated using a dataset of articles from the same journals published in 2016. RESULTS:0.19 vs 0.09; P<.001). Articles in the upper quantile of #SoME_Score were more than 5 times more likely to be among the upper quantile of those cites (odds ratio 5.61, 95% CI 4.70-6.73). CONCLUSIONS:Social media attention predicts citations and could be used as an early surrogate measure of scientific impact. Owing to the cross-sectional study design, we cannot determine whether correlation relates to causation.