Investigators evaluate patient outcomes with silicone vs polyurethane stents

A recent study evaluated silicone vs polyurethane stents found that the primary outcome of pain intensity and interference at 7 to 10 days did not show a significant difference between the silicone and polyurethane stent groups.¹

In an interview with Urology Times^®, John Michael DiBianco, MD, discussed what he found clinically relevant from the study, which was presented at the 40th Annual European Association of Urology Congress in Madrid, Spain.

“Unfortunately, stenting is a kind of necessary and known evil of ureteroscopy and stone treatment. The fact is that, especially in the United States, we are very far away from a time period where stents will not be necessary or commonly utilized. If we are doing, let's say, 100,000 of these cases every year, a million of these cases every year, can we make some sort of percentage difference, whether it's 2%, 4%, 5%. With numbers like that, that can make a lot of a difference to a lot of patients. I think that most urologists out there who do stone treatment and who stent people are biased in a way that we hear the stories, we hear the patient calls when patients are not happy with their stents and so forth. At least in my experience, I think that with some of the newer silicone stents, the ImaJin Hydro and other silicone stents, we tend to potentially hear less of that. That kind of biases me. Although maybe certain scoring surveys are not sensitive enough to pick up what a lot of us feel anecdotally in a clinical trial such as this, or the real nuts and bolts science, I think that a clinically relevant outcome is potentially less phone calls, maybe those daily pain scores, which may be a little bit more accurate as far as how the patient's feeling at that moment, rather than surveys, reflectively looking back,” said DiBianco, an assistant professor of urology at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

REFERENCE

1. DiBianco JM, Daignault-Newton S, Shoemaker E, et al. Is there a better stent? The Better Lithotripsy and Ureteroscopy Evaluation of Stenting (BLUES) randomized clinical trial comparing the patient experience of silicone vs polyurethane stents. Presented at: 40th Annual European Association of Urology Congress. March 21-24, 2025. Madrid, Spain. Abstract LB2. https://urosource.uroweb.org/resource-centres/EAU25/263407/abstract