Madison Wahlen on the BCG shortage’s impact on NMIBC outcomes

In this video, Madison M. Wahlen shares the background and key findings from 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.

Video Transcript

Could you describe the background/rationale for this study?

Since 2012 there have been intermittent and widespread shortages of BCG, which, as this audience is aware, is a really important drug for treating non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer, especially high-risk and intermediate-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer. There have been some studies in Europe and in Asia that have been single institution studies that have shown that patients whose care was impacted by shortages had inferior outcomes compared to patients who were not impacted by shortages. But those same studies hadn't really been conducted in the United States, and they were kind of limited, just in their sample size and they were conducted at single institutions. So, we had a unique opportunity to study this question in the United States and across multiple institutions and settings. That was what sparked this project.

What were the key findings from this study?

Our main findings, we found that patients whose care was impacted by shortages did not have statistically significantly worse recurrence outcomes compared to patients whose care was not impacted by shortages. Though, when we additionally adjusted our model for whether patients got BCG or not, we did see that there was still a detriment for patients who didn't receive BCG. So, compared to patients who did get BCG, patients who did not had worse recurrence.

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