Matthew Nielsen, MD, MS, FACS, previews key themes at the 2026 AUA Annual Meeting

The 2026 American Urological Association (AUA) Annual Meeting arrives at a moment of unusual momentum for the specialty—with landmark policy changes filtering into practice, a bladder cancer treatment landscape that has been transformed in a short period, and a programmatic emphasis on team-based care that reflects how urology is increasingly delivered, according to Matthew Nielsen, MD, MS, FACS, who previewed the meeting's themes and his own expectations for what attendees will take away.

Nielsen, who is chair of urology and the John Sloan Rhodes and John Flint Rhodes Distinguished Professor of Urology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, opened with 2 policy developments he described as underappreciated in their likely long-term impact. The first is the FDA's removal of the black box warning on vaginal estrogen—a direct outgrowth of the AUA's genitourinary syndrome of menopause guideline and the advocacy work that followed it.

Related: From GSM guidance to HRT reform: A landmark year for women’s health

"The ripple effect of that in terms of practice, I think will be significant," he said. The guideline, he noted, cast light on a condition that had long been undertreated and identified the black box warning as a concrete barrier to care for millions of women. That the warning has now been removed represents, in his view, a high-impact policy change whose full effect on clinical practice is still unfolding.

The second development is earlier in its trajectory: efforts to establish a federal Office of Men's Health, with AUA leadership among the key stakeholders driving that conversation. Nielsen was careful to frame this not as a counterweight to women's health priorities but as an additive effort.

"It's not a zero sum game," he said.

"Lower life expectancy, lots of preventable death among men—starting that national conversation to see that we can make great progress in that space too." A session at the Sexual Medicine Society of North America program during the meeting will address this directly.

On the clinical science front, Nielsen pointed to bladder cancer as the area where the program will be most substantive.

"We have new treatment approaches that we've been waiting for literally decades for, and now suddenly we have many of them," he said. Understanding where these agents fit into the patient journey, and how advanced imaging is changing care, will be among the meeting's central themes.

A named plenary lecture Nielsen highlighted specifically is H. Gilbert Welch, MD's, Ramon Guiteras Lecture: "What Urologists Have Taught Us About Screening & Incidental Detection in Cancer (or at least, what they’ve taught me)"—which he anticipated as a thoughtful external perspective on the tension between early detection and overtreatment.

"I'm proud of what our field has done in pioneering active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer and uncoupling diagnosis from treatment in a cancer setting," Nielsen said.

For attendees navigating the program, Nielsen recommended anchoring around the plenary schedule as consistently high-yield, while using subspecialty society sessions and instructional courses strategically based on practice needs. He also highlighted what he described as a meaningful shift in this year's program: a deliberate integration of advanced practice providers across the meeting rather than siloing APP-focused content in separate sessions.

"APPs will be on the plenary stage," he said. "The AUA is very much at the cutting edge of specialty societies in really appreciating that."