Opinion
Video
Does varicocele affect prostate cancer outcomes?
Author(s):
"We found that with a 5-year Kaplan-Meier survival analysis that patients with varicocele had worse outcomes than patients without varicocele," says Muhammed A. Moukhtar Hammad, MBBCh.
In this video, Muhammed A. Moukhtar Hammad, MBBCh, discusses the study “Exploring the Impact of Varicocele on Prostate Cancer Patients: A Propensity-Score Matched Analysis Using Global Real-World Data,” which he presented at the 25th Annual Fall Scientific Meeting of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America in Scottsdale, Arizona. Hammad is a Masters of Biomedical and Translational Science Candidate at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) School of Medicine and a clinical research fellow at UCI Health – Department of Urology.
Transcription:
Please provide an overview of this study and its notable findings.
As you know, infertility is one of the main issues in men's health, and varicocele is one of the most common causes of infertility, if not the most common cause. Recent literature has arisen regarding the aggressiveness of prostate cancer related to infertility, so we wanted to question this, and we wanted as many patients as possible. We queried a real-time database known as TriNetX. When we looked at outcomes, we had 2 groups: one [with patients with] prostate cancer with varicocele, the other [with patients with] prostate cancer without varicocele. When you have 2 groups, you want to try to compare them apples to apples, so we did something called propensity score matching. Basically, you have a lot of factors that you try to eliminate in order to make sure that you have 2 comparable groups. A lot of co-factors were included. We basically had 2 comparable groups at the end, each having 3800 patients. When we compared both groups, we had a lot of findings to deduce from the study. We found that with a 5-year Kaplan-Meier survival analysis that patients with varicocele had worse outcomes than patients without varicocele. The only question that I had in mind after the study was, would it hurt for [patients with] prostate cancer [who have a] varicocele to have a varicocelectomy before going to a radical prostatectomy? That's the question we'll try to answer later on.
This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.
