Study findings point to disparities in pain management for kidney stones

Researchers from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, have uncovered disparities in pain management for patients with nephrolithiasis, in a study presented at the 2025 American Urological Association Annual Urology Advocacy Summit in Washington.¹

In a video interview with Urology Times®, University of Minnesota medical student Hailey Frye described the background behind the study.

“The project really stemmed from conversations that we were having in clinic as far as how patients are being managed and how their care is being provided in the emergency department, before they came up and worked with the urologist for their kidney stones. [That] led to a discussion about overall disparities in care and disparities in medicine and in urology. The first step to addressing disparities is to identify them, so we aimed to characterize how socioeconomic factors and the likelihood of receiving opioids for pain management were related, specifically for kidney stones,” Frye said.

She also described the methodology behind the research.

“Here at the University of Minnesota, we have a department called the Clinical Quality Outcomes Discovery and Evaluation Team…that basically takes a lot of information from our medical records, and we were able to create a database for everyone that came to the emergency departments in 2019 to 2022, across all 14 of our emergency departments. With that information, we're able to control for age, sex, race, primary language, and insurance type.”

In terms of notable findings, “We found that female patients, Black patients, and patients with non-private insurance had a decreased odds of receiving opioids,” Frye told Urology Times.

She added, “When we first identified that, we really wanted to address that—not saying that opioids are the best form of treatment for pain management for kidney stones—but just that there was a difference going on between these different populations, and we wanted to see next steps could look like to address that difference.”

REFERENCE

1. Frye HH, Ganesan V, Agarwal D, Patterson B, Herman A, Borofsky MS. Need for pain management policies: Uncovering hidden biases in pain management of nephrolithiasis. Presented at: American Urological Association Annual Urology Advocacy Summit. March 3-5, 2025. Washington. https://www.auasummit.org/virtual-poster-session