The Urologic Diseases Epidemiology Program funds descriptive and analytic epidemiology, including development and analysis of surveillance databases, cross-sectional surveys, prospective observational studies, and case-control studies (for evaluating rare diseases).
Key areas of interest include preventing disease, developing early markers of injury, defining risk factors for morbidity and mortality, and increasing evaluation of urologic disease measurements and outcomes in ongoing observational studies.
“The program is dedicated to increasing the availability of epidemiologic data through both development of new databases and full utilization of existing Federal, State, and private sources of data. The United States Renal Data System (USRDS) is an NIDDK funded contract and is operated under cooperation with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Researchers can request USRDS standard analysis file at http://www.usrds.org. NIDDK also operates the NIDDK Repository which makes clinical data bases available to researchers at https://www.niddkrepository.org/niddk/home.do. In addition, NIDDK supports the collection of kidney function data in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics.”
Urologic Diseases in America (UDA)
Urologic diseases cover a wide range of conditions, symptoms, and problems that include such diverse diagnoses as cancer, pelvic pain, sexual dysfunction, urinary incontinence, kidney stones, and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Together, they place a large burden on the American population.
To remedy this lack of information, NIDDK initiated the Urologic Disease in America (UDA) project. The UDA compendium delineates the changes in the epidemiology, health economic impact, and practice patterns for the diseases currently included within the scope of practice of the specialty of urology, analyzed retrospectively over a ten-year period. The UDA compendium consists of data tables annotated in chapters that amplify the data analyses.
The objectives of the UDA project include secondary data analyses of the following topics: (1) changes in the overall health care burden for individual urologic diseases; (2) changes in physician practice patterns for each urologic disease; (3) changes in demographics of persons with urologic disease; (4) the impact of specific urologic diseases, especially diseases of the prostate, on the minority populations of the U.S.; and (5) documentation of new and evolving therapies for urologic disease and their potential impact on treatment outcomes and health care costs.
The project ran from 2001 to 2007. The resultant compendium can be found at http://kidney.niddk.nih.gov/statistics/uda/index.htm.
The second phase of the UDA began in 2007. In addition to updating the original compendium, the second UDA will focus less on descriptive analyses and more on analytical outcomes analyses. In addition, the second phase will attempt to increase involvement of the urologic community in analytical activities.
The NIDDK project officer on this contract is Dr. Paul Eggers (eggersp@extra.niddk.nih.gov).
The NIDDK science officers on this contract are Dr. Leroy Nyberg (nybergl@extra.niddk.nih.gov) and Dr. Stuart Howards (Howards@extra.niddk.nih.gov).
