CORRESPONDENCE

Response to M. Brehmer: Register-based research. Accurate data and analysis, crucial for correct conclusions. Comment on ‘Incidence, mortality, and relative survival of patients with cancer of the bladder and upper urothelial tract in the Nordic countries between 1990 and 2019’

Eemil Karttunena, Jan Oldenburgb, Steinar Thoresenc and Anders Ullénd

aMerck OY, an affiliate of Merck KGaA, Espoo, Finland; bDepartment of Oncology, Akershus University Hospital, Oslo, Norway; cMerck AB NUF, an affiliate of Merck KGaA, Oslo, Norway; dDepartment of Oncology, Karolinska University Hospital, Solna, Sweden

 

Citation: Scandinavian Journal of Urology 2023, VOL. 58, 20. https://doi.org/10.2340/sju.v58.10299.

Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). Published by MJS Publishing on behalf of Acta Chirurgica Scandinavica. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for non-commercial purposes, provided proper attribution to the original work.

Published: June 1, 2023

CONTACT Eemil Karttunen Eemil.karttunen@merckgroup.com Merck OY, Keilaranta 6, 02150 Espoo, Finland, an affiliate of Merck KGaA

 

To the Editor,

We thank Dr Brehmer for thoughtful reflections on our recent article [1–4]. We would like to make some comments to her editorial.

Firstly, it is stated that our article lacks the required data in order to understand the potential impact of new treatment options for urothelial cancer. We consider our study to be a baseline to enable future comparisons between treatment paradigms and to describe the current general situation of urothelial cancer in the Nordic countries in terms of the epidemiologic endpoints. We argue that our results that showed stable incidence, increased relative survival and declining mortality over time in the Nordic countries facilitate such comparisons. We believe that these results may be due to improvements in diagnostic work-up and treatment between 1990 and 2019.

Secondly, an admitted limitation of our study is the lack of data on tumour stage and grade in the NORDCAN database. Therefore, we have not attempted to quantify the impact of newly introduced treatments on mortality or survival. As pointed out by Brehmer, more granulated data are needed to draw firm conclusions regarding the effect of novel treatments. One way to create such a resource is to use and merge national clinical cancer registers, which contain highly granulated data [5, 6].

Acknowledgements

Eemil Karttunen is an employee at Merck OY, Espoo, Finland, an affiliate of Merck KGaA. Jan Oldenburg reports receiving grant support from MSD, consulting fees from Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Eisai, Ipsen and Janssen-Cilag, grant support and consulting fees from Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck and Roche, and participation in speakers bureaus sponsored by Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer and Bristol Myers Squibb. Steinar Thoresen is a consultant at Merck AB NUF, Oslo, Norway, an affiliate of Merck KGaA. Anders Ullén has received speaker honoraria or served on an advisory board for Astellas, Janssen-Cilag, Merck, MSD, Pierre-Fabre and Roche.

ORCID

Eemil Karttunen symbol https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2013-5171

References

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