Dear Sir,
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the letter concerning our recently published article titled “Clinical Study of Steroid Receptors in Nonmuscle Invasive Bladder Cancer: A Domain Worth Revisiting”[1]. We appreciate the reader’s interest in our study and would like to provide clarification on the points raised. We acknowledge the study by Shrivastava et al. and that the work, indeed, contributes valuable insights into steroid receptor expression in carcinoma urinary bladder within the Indian population.[2] However, we would like to clarify that there was no oversight in not citing it in our article. It may be noted that our ethical committee approval which is mentioned in the manuscript Ethics committee (No: INT/IEC/2020/SPL-1474) was granted in 2020 before the work by Shrivastava et al. was published. Furthermore, at the time of submission of our manuscript to the Indian Journal of Urology, i.e., on August 22, 2023, the study by Shrivastava et al. was not published. (It was published in November 2023). We have also clearly stated that this is the first study on the role of steroid receptors in a uniform cohort of NMIBC patients and are not negating their significant contribution. However, given an opportunity, we would like to acknowledge their work and cite it in our manuscript.
We understand the importance of conducting separate survival analyses for different risk categories, grades, and stages of NMIBC. We acknowledge that our study combined all grades and stages for survival analysis due to limitations in sample size. However, we agree that stratifying the analysis based on these factors would provide more granular insights into the role of steroid receptors in NMIBC prognosis. In addition, we acknowledge the importance of comparing steroid receptor expression in patients with malignancy to a control population for a better understanding of the differences. As this was a pilot study with limited resources, we did not include controls. However, another study on MIBC patients is currently ongoing at our center in which a control population has been included. Characterization of receptor expression in epithelial versus stromal cells is a valuable suggestion that we will consider in future research endeavors. Further, regarding patient and tumor-related multivariate analysis, we state that it was performed, but to maintain the brevity of the paper, it was excluded from the manuscript. Once again, we thank the readers for their thoughtful insights and constructive feedback.
Financial support and sponsorship
Nil.
Conflicts of interest
There are no conflicts of interest.
REFERENCES
- 1.Sharma AP, Singh PP, Chauhan R, Panda I, Devana SK, Bora GS, et al. Clinical study of steroid receptors in nonmuscle invasive bladder cancer: A domain worth revisiting. Indian J Urol. 2024;40:127–32. doi: 10.4103/iju.iju_324_23. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 2.Shrivastava N, Jena R, Choudhary GR, Bhargava P, Vishwajeet V, Elhence P, et al. Correlation between androgen and estrogen receptor expression and clinicopathologic features in carcinoma urinary bladder. J Cancer Res Clin Oncol. 2023;149:15795–804. doi: 10.1007/s00432-023-05348-z. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]