A longitudinal non-invasive study of changes in urinary bladder contractility secondary to benign prostatic hyperplasia.

With increasing age the prostate enlarges. In response to the increasing resistance to urinary flow, the urinary bladder changes (compensation). At a later stage the bladder may decompensate which eventually makes emptying the bladder impossible (urinary retention).
During the compensation phase, pressures in the bladder may become excessive, leading to reflux of urine and kidney damage.
Compensation and decompensation of the urinary bladder muscle are important issues in the decision to operate. These changes in function of the bladder muscle can be assessed by calculating its contractility from urodynamic measurements of pressure and flow-rate during voiding. Presently, such pressure measurements are invasive.
For this reason these measurements are not done as often as desirable and have also rarely been done in an epidemiological study.
Therefore no reference data on the development of the contractility of the bladder muscle in response to prostatic enlargement is available and it is unknown if and when a certain degree of obstruction of the outflow tract will cause irreversible damage to the bladder wall muscle.
The sector Furore (Physics, function and reconstruction of the urinary tract) of the department Urology of the EMCR has developed a method to measure the urinary bladder pressure non-invasively.
This method now makes it possible to acquire the necessary reference data in a non-invasive epidemiological study.

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Non-invasive measurement of the urinary bladder pressure.