Investigators explore social vulnerability and urinary incontinence

In this video, William Furuyama, MD, discusses the Urology paper “Social Vulnerability is Associated with Worse Urinary Incontinence and Quality of Life in Women.” Furuyama is a urology resident at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

Transcription:

The abstract mentions targeted policy interventions. Based on your findings, what specific types of interventions at the community level do you believe would be most effective in mitigating the burden of UI in socially vulnerable populations?

I think targeting things that make communities more vulnerable would be reasonable things to target to try and affect disease practices. I also think that targeting these things would affect urinary incontinence, because we know a lot of these things are associated with worse disease severity. But I think thinking about things like trying to ensure that people have access to housing, trying to help people with educational attainment, trying to make sure that people have access to reliable transportation, I think all will make our communities healthier, not just from a urologic perspective, but in general. And I think we know that trying to reduce the amount of social stress in an environment is helpful for people with incontinence or, I guess the study points toward that. I don't think that we know that definitively, but I think this study points to trying to focus on the social environment as a site of intervention through those sorts of things.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.