Johns Hopkins on Bladder cancer

Yesterday I found the Johns Hopkins pathology directory, which includes several of their sites on different cancers. Today I'll go over what they have provided for bladder cancer.

The opening home page describes the base statistics and nicely presents tabs for navigating the site. On the right it has a link for information for patients and families, but it basically tells you to go to the Disease Information tab. On the left is the outline of information, which covers overview, anatomy, cancer development, and treatment. I found their descriptions to be detailed but still accessible for general readers, though you may have to look up a few of the terms.

 One of the sections is on clinical trials, which desribes their purpose and usage very well. At the bottom, they have links to trials being conducted at Johns Hopkins. Unfortunately, when I was looking at this page, all the links were broken and took you to an error page. I found the National Cancer Institue Trials registry myself, but it's so big and awesome that I'm going to have to do a separate post about it. For now, i'll just provide their link for you if you click here.

So, back to the bladder cancer site, they maintain a discussion board where current and former patients can help each other. Posts go back to April 2002. It looks like this discussion board is monitored/facilitated by Dr. David Berman, one of the pathologists who works at Johns Hopkins, and he often replies to patients needing more professional medical advice. There's no search function or quick way to sort through everything, unfortunately, so you'd just have to schlep through all the posts if you were looking for something in particular. Also, weirdly, there's no post more recent than December 16th, 2010. I don't know why it hasn't been used in the last 5 months--maybe no one that knows about it has had a question.

Similarly, the Bladder Blog has not been updated since December 2009. I don't know why they've let these go, because they seem like they'd be really useful. The few posts that are on there are awesome, presented by several different doctors. The introductory post seems to be the most useful, mostly because of the reader interaction it generated. Like with the discussion board, Dr. Berman invited people to present their queries in the comments, and he and some of his colleagues answered many of them in reply in the comments. If you have questions, these may be a good place to start, as the patients are asking about very specific situations which may be relevant to your needs. It also has the advantage over the disucssion board of having all the responses displayed in full on one single page.

I didn't find anything about exercise on the main site, discussion board, or in the blog (I even did a search function for the word "exercise" in the comments on that intro blog post). My guess would be that as long as the abdominal muscle wall was not cut through to do a full bladder removal, there would be no contraindication to exercise after bladder cancer. The main issue is probably going to be incontinence, like with prostate cancer. I will try to find studies that speak to this subject, though because I've not heard of any, my guess is that it's probably not  been looked at much.