William Furuyama, MD, on social vulnerability and urinary incontinence

In this video, William Furuyama, MD, discusses the background and notable findings of 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:

Please provide an overview of this study and its notable findings.

This is a retrospective study looking at the relationship between social vulnerability and urinary incontinence. Social vulnerability is a construct that was created by the CDC, actually for disaster planning, but it's based on location and takes a number of neighborhood characteristics into account, like the socioeconomic status of different people who live in an area, crowding, access to transportation, those sorts of things, and creates a numeric-like vector, I guess, to describe that area and quantify the social vulnerability. People have used that in different settings to correlate it with disease severity for cardiovascular disease, and talk about COVID-19 infection rates. We thought it might be interesting to look at something like a benign urologic condition like urinary incontinence, and see whether there was a relationship between that and social vulnerability. What we found is that there was a relationship. This is maybe not so surprising, because we know that things like overactive bladder correlate with psychosocial stress, and you can imagine that living in a more vulnerable area, you might experience higher degrees of environmental stress, and that could be a sort of pathway for that. But I think it was interesting to think about the relationship between a disease process and a person's environment, and measure that and establish that relationship in a quantitative way.

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