Madison Wahlen on navigating the impact of the BCG shortage

In this video, Madison M. Wahlen highlights the implications and potential future research directions based on the study, “The impact of BCG shortage on disease recurrence for patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer: A SEER patterns of care analysis,” which was presented atthe Society of Urologic Oncology 25th Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas. Wahlen is a third-year medical student at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City.

What are the implications of these findings?

Some of the main implications for urologists is that the risk adapted utilization of BCG, which has been implemented as guidelines, should continue, and prioritization of BCG should continue to be for patients who are at highest risk of poor outcomes. It seems like that will likely mitigate some of the adverse outcomes that could be related to BCG shortages. I also think that just more from a policy standpoint, or from a future direction for the field would be to continue to develop other alternatives to BCG that are as good or better to mitigate any of the inferior outcomes that could arise from BCG shortages or patients just not being able to access BCG.

What future work is planned on this topic?

Something that I'm really interested in is when clinicians don't have access to BCG, what they're using instead to treat these patients who they would normally treat with BCG. That's something that I would be really interested in looking at. What are clinicians using? And then doing some comparative effectiveness research, where you look at of those alternative treatments that are being used, which one seems to be the best in practice, and which one results in the best outcomes for patients?

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