Patient’s Reported Outcome and Reconstructive Urethral Surgery: A “First Toe in the Water”

Eur Urol, 2011: 60, 69 – 71
 
Urethral strictures are a frequent source of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in men, but a systematic analysis on patients’ quality of life (QoL) is rarely reported in the literature. The clinical history and follow-up thus far have been used to gain a summary view of the symptoms experienced by patients before the surgery and the impact of urethroplasty after urethral reconstruction. Urologists are familiar with several tools of measuring QoL in patients suffering from urinary incontinence (UI) or LUTS. They include voiding diaries and questionnaires and may represent the most important clinical review of the impact of symptoms and the benefit of treatment from a patient perspective.
Tannenbaum and Corcos performed a systematic review of the literature on outcome measures for the assessment of UI and LUTS in adults. They classified the available instruments by type (ie, subjective measures, objective measures, clinical observations, QoL, and combined instruments) and by the assessment of their psychometric properties (reliability, validity, and responsiveness). Although the authors found several clinical tools (ie, voiding diaries, the Incontinence Impact Questionnaire, the King’s Health Questionnaire, the Incontinence Quality of Life Questionnaire, the Urogenital Distress Inventory, and the International Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire), none of them provides a method for the standardised collection of LUTS or other subjective phenomena for patients with urethral strictures……..
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