Jaspreet S. Sandhu, MD, on post-prostatectomy incontinence

In this video, Jaspreet S. Sandhu, MD, summarizes his talk from the Desai Sethi Urology Institute Urology on the Beach meeting titled “Updates in Management of Male SUI” and discusses the psychological impact of urinary incontinence in men who have undergone radical prostatectomy. Sandhu is an attending surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, New York.

Transcription:

Please share some highlights from your Desai Sethi Urology Institute Urology on the Beach talk "Updates in Management of Male SUI."

I was asked to give a talk on updates and management of male stress urinary incontinence, which I did, and luckily, the AUA helped me out, because they had an amendment to our recent guideline on incontinence after prostate treatment. So it was basically going over evaluation, management, primarily focusing on new things, and pretty straightforward actually, because all the guidelines are available at auanet.org So anybody who wants to find out what I did can go there and just pretty much download everything.

How do you address the psychological impact of post-prostatectomy incontinence on patients, such as anxiety, depression, and social isolation?

That's a very good question. We actually don't have formal mental health folks that help us, unlike sexual medicine, where they do have formal psychiatrists and psychologists that work with them. But men, it has been shown over and over again that urinary incontinence is associated with depression, not exercising—patients actually have weight gain. They're isolated. That's actually very well documented. When I have patients come in, they've gained 10 to 20 pounds because they haven't been to gym recently. Part of the reason they haven't been the gym recently is because they leak a lot. You can help them and tell them, "If we can get your leakage or urinary incontinence better, there's a pretty good chance you'll get your life back." And in fact, once we do procedures—and by procedures I mean generally minor surgical procedures: slings, sphincters, balloons are the 3 that we talked about this morning—when they have those procedures, most of the patients afterwards think their life has changed. In fact, I have letters from patients saying, "you actually renewed my faith in the medical system because you helped me out so much." So if you can do this surgery well, patients actually go back to living a normal life, and they're immensely, immensely happy.

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