Well-trained staff is the key to the success of urodynamic testing

I enjoyed reading this paper from the Methodist Hospital in Houston because it is practical and had a simple purpose: to see if they could find a way to make urodynamic studies (UDS) more comfortable.1 They believed that allowing patients to wear headphones and select their music would result in lower pain and anxiety scores. The authors conclude that personal selection of music during UDS testing did not improve pain scores. Remarkably, both groups of patients, with music and without music, found UDS to be extremely well-tolerated with visual analogue scores (VAS) of 1.04 and 1.57, respectively. I’ve often thought I would pass out at the insertion of a xylocaine jelly in cystoscopy, so I marvelled at the fact that these patients are clearly tough. As the authors point out, this is actually the second negative study to show that catheterizing to Coldplay or voiding with Vivaldi isn’t required for a comfortable UDS experience