RESEARCH NEWS

BACH Study to Offer Novel Survey of Urologic Disease Landscape

“Imagine getting a call out of the blue from an unknown group saying that they want to come to your home early in the morning, take 2 or 3 hours of your time, measure your weight and waist, and take a blood sample” is how the investigator describes it.

Can you imagine anyone agreeing to this proposal?

You’d be surprised how many people do.

For more than 3 years, staff from the Boston Area Community Health Survey, or BACH, have fanned out across Boston, knocking on doors in both the posh enclaves and the rougher neighborhoods. They have asked nearly 5,500 people about a range of urologic problems rarely spoken about, much less treated: urinary incontinence, prostate problems, and chronic pelvic pain. And they have collected thousands of blood samples.

Shoe Leather Epidemiology
The long months of shoe leather epidemiology are about to pay off for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease, or NIDDK-supported study conducted by the New England Research Institutes, or NERI. Recruitment ended in April 2005 and investigators are poring over reams of data to deliver the most comprehensive picture yet of urologic and urogynecologic health in America.

“It will provide some of the first prevalence rates and risk factors for urologic problems [that have] ever [been] published,” said John McKinlay, Ph.D., who oversees the survey for NERI. “We don’t even know what the prevalence of interstitial cystitis is. We don’t know what the prevalence is of benign prostatic hyperplasia. We don’t know what obesity means for urinary incontinence.”

The research will generate 20 to 30 major publications over the next year, McKinlay said, as the information gathered is put into usable form. In addition to the data on urologic symptoms, the investigators also recorded medicine and supplement use, which McKinlay said may be another great trove of information on the pharmacoepidemiology of urologic disease. And the biosamples gathered will offer researchers a rich resource for the future as new biomarkers of disease are discovered, he said.

“If some researchers come along and say they have a protein that can identify pelvic pain, we can cost-effectively go to the BACH samples,” he said. “We already have these data on well characterized subjects.”

‘Ambitious Project’
“This is a pretty ambitious project,” said John Kusek, Ph.D., who directs urology clinical trials at NIDDK. “It’ll pay off soon and pay off handsomely. As the population ages, many of these urologic conditions will become more prevalent, and it will be nice to know what the risk factors are.” Kusek and NIDDK colleague Paul Eggers, Ph.D., the program manager for the study, said they will now await––along with much of the urology community—the as-yet-unpublished findings.

NIH Publication No. 06–5743
October 2005