William Furuyama, MD, on community factors’ influence on urinary incontinence

In this video, William Furuyama, MD, shares the take-home message from 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:

What is the take-home message for the practicing urologist?

I think, a lot of times, people with urinary incontinence or overactive bladder wonder why those things are happening to them. I think that's a very common question; the etiology of someone's illness or disease. Having a broader understanding of why someone might be experiencing the disease process or symptoms that they're coming in with is really meaningful and helpful, both to patients and to physicians and providers who are trying to counsel patients on what's going on with their bodies. Being able to talk about the social environment, talk about psychosocial stress, talk about these kinds of things, and their influence on these conditions can be really powerful and meaningful to people.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I think this paper certainly has a number of limitations. It's a retrospective study; it's a survey. It's a big survey, but certainly it's prone to the biases associated with that. But I think for me, it leads more to additional questions than to a specific intervention that we can use. I think it really begins to implicate the social environment and neighborhoods in the pathology of overactive bladder and makes me curious more about how those relationships happen for people and sort of the through line there, and whether interventions upstream in the neighborhood could actually impact people's experience with urinary incontinence.

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