==== Front J Transl Med J Transl Med Journal of Translational Medicine 1479-5876 BioMed Central London 2668 10.1186/s12967-020-02668-3 Letter to the Editor Survival differences by ethnicity among patients diagnosed with bladder cancer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8373-4584Guo Boda 12 http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9557-5488Liu Ming liumingbjhu@126.com 12 1 Department of Urology, Beijing Hospital, National Center of Gerontology; Institute of Geriatric Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, 100730 China 2 grid.506261.60000 0001 0706 7839Graduate School of Peking, Union Medical College, Beijing, 100730 China 14 12 2020 14 12 2020 2020 18 48629 10 2020 4 12 2020 © The Author(s) 2020Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.issue-copyright-statement© The Author(s) 2020 ==== Body Dear Editor, We read the study by Fang et al. [1] with great interest and would like to congratulate the authors for their superb study. The authors compared the oncologic outcomes of bladder cancer (BC) of different ethnicities, which may aid in clinical decision-making. As such, there are a few points that we would like to bring up.Their study included patients with primary BC but did not exclude multiple primary cancers. However, another SEER-based study showed BC patients were at a significantly higher risk of developing a second malignancy, which may affect patients’ survival [2]. BC surgery in the SEER database includes transurethral resection of bladder, partial cystectomy and complete cystectomy, etc. It would be more meaningful to stratify patients according to the type of surgery that they received; in this way, readers can easily see which surgical treatment improves BC patient’s survival better. Some of the patients included in the analysis received radiotherapy or chemotherapy. These two types of treatment should be taken into consideration since prior studies showed that both radiotherapy and chemotherapy hold great potential in the management of BC patients [3, 4]. Abbreviation BCBladder cancer Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Acknowledgements None. Disclaimers The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. Authors’ contributions BG reviewed the relevant study and drafted this letter. ML revised this letter for critical content and scientific rigour. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript. Funding Not applicable. Availability of data and materials Not applicable. Ethics approval and consent to participate Not applicable. Consent for publication Not applicable. Competing interests Not applicable. ==== Refs References 1. Fang W Yang ZY Chen TY Shen XF Zhang C Ethnicity and survival in bladder cancer: a population-based study based on the SEER database J Transl Med. 2020 18 1 145 10.1186/s12967-020-02308-w 32228610 2. Khanal A Budhathoki N Singh VP Shah BK Second primary malignancy in bladder carcinoma—a population-based study Anticancer Res 2017 37 4 2033 2036 10.21873/anticanres.11548 28373478 3. Diaz DA Pollack A Reis IM Mahmoud O Gonzalgo ML Ishkanian A Neoadjuvant radiotherapy improves survival in patients with T2b/T3 bladder cancer: a population-based analysis Clin Genitourin Cancer. 2015 13 4 378 384 10.1016/j.clgc.2015.02.014 25907230 4. Galsky MD Stensland KD Moshier E Sfakianos JP McBride RB Tsao CK Effectiveness of adjuvant chemotherapy for locally advanced bladder cancer J Clin Oncol 2016 34 8 825 832 10.1200/JCO.2015.64.1076 26786930