Guidelines

Testicular Cancer

For the Germ Cell Tumour section, new and relevant evidence has been identified, collated and appraised through a structured assessment of the literature. The search was limited to studies representing high levels of evidence (i.e. systematic reviews with meta-analysis, randomised controlled trials (RCTs), and prospective non-randomised comparative studies) published in the English language. The search was restricted to articles published between November 8th 2017 and June 13th 2018. Databases covered by the search included Pubmed, Ovid, EMBASE and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. After deduplication, a total of 1,230 unique records were identified, retrieved and screened for relevance. Thirty new papers have been included in the 2019 print.

For testicular stromal tumours additional literature has been added. Two scoping searches covering the time frame between Jan 1st, 2014 and Aug 26th, 2018 were performed. After deduplication, a total of 159 unique records were identified, retrieved and screened for relevance. Conference abstracts, editorials, letter to the editor and case reports were excluded from the searches.

Aside from the new references identified and added to the text and detailed above,  key changes in this publication include:

  • Additional remarks on pathology examination and description have been added to the text for the 2019 print. This relates, in particular, to the definition and morphological description of Rete Testis Invasion and vascular invasion;
  • Citations relating to a number of low quality papers (SEER database on stromal tumors incidence and retrospective biased FDG-PETscan) have been removed  from the text. However, a decision has been made to include some small phase II studies in the relevant text section on second relapse since there are few publications addressing this rare and desperate clinical scenario;
  • A number of minor semantic modifications have been corrected in the text and the tables for 2019.