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Office, so that urology gets known, so that they learn what the EAU is doing. They must see that we can take care of incontinence, that we can take care of prostate cancer etc. We have to inspire and inform the policy makers about what we are doing and what we want!” The best example for that is the fact that prostate cancer screening has not been in the agenda since 2003, until we started knocking on the door, with the patients, to tell the politicians that this must change. So again, it is important to know that today in the EAU we have the Patient Office, where the patients are really represented, and the Policy Office. We work together with the common goal of improving urological care.
F.N.: Can you give us a hint about the next step in the activities of the EAU Policy Office?
H.vP.: Well, you know that we have been fighting for prostate cancer screening and the Commission has finally recommended prostate cancer screening programmes to setup gradually in the member states. We have a few pilot centres that will be funded by the European Commission. You know that in the European Parliament there will be re-elections next year. The former Parliament and the former Commission had put an enormous amount of money and effort in oncology in the “Europe’s Beat Cancer” plan. For the next Commission we probably can expect that there will be a lot of attention to mental health. We believe, as urologists and as EAU, that there should be an important place for the continence health or the incontinence problem, which is huge, it is global, not only European, it has implications on the environment, because of all the waste of the incontinence material, it has huge psychological and psychiatric impact on patients and on their families. So, the next important thing that we will try to realize with the Policy Office, under the guidance of Philip van Kerrebroeck, who is the vice-Chairman of the Policy Office, is to work with the Parliament and the Commission on doing something about continence health and to tackle incontinence problems in the European Union. The next step may be kidney cancer screening and bladder cancer screening. Lung cancer is also one of the cancers for which the European Council decided to have recommendations for screening in people at risk. So, for kidney and bladder cancer this should be the same and risk groups screening should be introduced rather shortly. These are tasks that the EAU Policy Office will take on in the future.
T.S: In 1999 you received the Folke Edsmyr Award for the outstanding contribution to the progress of cancer research in Urology in Stockholm and in 2015 the Pieter De Mulder Award for your significant contribution
in Urology for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma in Lyon. Could you remember your feelings back then?
H.vP.: If you look at the names of the people that have got the Folke Edsmyr and Pieter De Mulder Award, then you realise that you are among these happy few who have been awarded. When I look at these names, I always felt humbled since these for me were like gods. And suddenly your name is in the list! It is a strange feeling, but a good one! I was very active in the development of partial nephrectomy for kidney cancer. I gave one of my first presentations in Lisbon, at a Congress of the European Society of Surgical Oncology, on partial nephrectomy for solid renal masses. And I was almost “killed”. I got so much criticism from the audience and chairpersons because they believed that you cannot do partial nephrectomy for a disease like kidney cancer that kills so many people. By the time I have done one of the first publications on it, in the BJU, then I had presentations everywhere. The Folke Edsmyr and Pieter De Mulder election panels have probably been inspired by the work that I did on partial nephrectomy, also because I did the only randomized study in the EORTC showing that partial nephrectomy was oncologically equivalent to radical nephrectomy, while radical nephrectomy had a lot of disadvantages. The second huge clinical work we did was on high-risk prostate cancer. High-risk prostate cancer was by many considered as non-surgical disease. Patrick Walsh from Baltimore was always advocating that you need to cure prostate cancer in its curable stages. This meant that he did T1 and T2 cancers and cured the majority of them, while he was able to do this in a nerve-sparing way, which was an enormous achievement. When I came back from Mainz and Rotterdam, I started performing radical prostatectomies in Leuven, on T3 tumours, that are those that you can feel with your finger, because there wasn’t an early detection programme. So, we also had strong records and publications regarding the surgery of high-risk prostate cancer patients and again that was something that became internationally known. I believe that this had made the department of Urology of the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), and even myself, linked to the progress that we have been realizing for our prostate cancer patients.
Tεύχος 25 | Σεπτέμβριος – Οκτώβριος 2023
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