The presence of baseline KPS less than 80% or visceral metastasis has an impact on survival. Reporting the proportion of patients with zero, one, and two risk factors will facilitate understanding of the relevance of the median survival in phase II trials. Phase III trials should stratify patients according to the number of risk factors to avoid imbalance in treatment arms.

BACKGROUND. Neoadjuvant cisplatin‐based chemotherapy improves survival in muscle‐invasive urothelial cancer, with MVAC (methotrexate, vinblastine, doxorubicin and cisplatin) considered the standard regimen. Gemcitabine plus cisplatin (GC) has similar efficacy and less toxicity than MVAC in metastatic disease, but is untested as neoadjuvant treatment. METHODS. The authors retrospectively evaluated patients with muscle‐invasive urothelial carcinoma who received neoadjuvant GC before radical cystectomy between November 2000 and December 2006 at Memorial Sloan‐Kettering Cancer Center. Post‐therapy pathological downstaging to either residual disease at cystectomy (pT0) or no residual muscle‐invasion (

As compared with incision and drainage alone, clindamycin or TMP-SMX in conjunction with incision and drainage improves short-term outcomes in patients who have a simple abscess. This benefit must be weighed against the known side-effect profile of these antimicrobials. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00730028 .).