Pictured from left to right: Ben Rubin, LCOM Medical Student; Susan Campbell, Lab Technician in Dr. Vizzard’s lab; Hannah Fallon, Lab Technician in Dr. Herrera’s lab; and Dr. Gerry Herrera. Not pictured, but instrumental to the project: Dr. Margaret Vizzard
Congratulations to Ben Rubin, a medical student at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont on his first-author publication coming from a summer project he did in collaboration with me and Margaret Vizzard.
Impact of Surgical Bladder Catheter Implantation on Voiding Function in Mice.
https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpregu.00300.2024
Ben did a really great job conducting this study, analyzing the data, writing up the results as a manuscript, and presenting the results at several local and national scientific conferences. In this study, we compared urinary voiding behavior in male and female mice as assessed with invasive urodynamics (cystometry), where a catheter is surgically implanted into the lumen of the bladder, with voiding behavior measured non-invasively using our UroVoid apparatus. We demonstrate that surgical bladder catheter implantation results in a physical reduction in bladder volume. We also demonstrate a clear sexual dimorphism in bladder capacity between male and female mice, with females having significantly smaller bladder volumes than males when normalized for body size variations. Our results demonstrate that non-invasive bladder function measurements provide valuable information about normal lower urinary tract function, including bladder capacity, intermicturtion interval, as well as providing an index of urine production rate. Invasive urodynamics procedures provide the added benefit of manifesting the relationship between bladder pressure and volume in vivo, with the caveat that implanting the catheter for making the measurements can affect bladder capacity determination.