Ureteral Stent Related Symptoms and Pharmacotherapy : A Brief Narrative Review.

The purpose of this article is to review the effects of different types of pharmacotherapy on symptoms that affect the quality of patient's life after stent insertion. A thorough Medline/PubMed non- systematic review was conducted from 1987 to January of 2023, using the terms: "pigtail" OR "ureteral stents" AND "lower urinary tracts symptoms" OR "LUTS" AND "pharmacotherapy" OR "drugs".Relevant studies in english language that were conducted in humans were included. The available reviews and articles associating the use of drugs to stent related symptoms provide conflicting results. Most of them show a clear benefit of alpha blockers,particularly alfuzosin on treating urinary stent related symptoms and hence there is a strong recommendation for the use of alpha blockers for the treatment of Stent Related Symptoms (srs) in the guidelines of European Association of Urology. Anticholinergics and mirabegron have shown a significant benefit in dealing with irritative bladder symptoms. On the contrary,the findings on combination therapies are contradicting, with some studies showing that combination therapy is not superior to monotherapy regarding most of the subsets of Ureteral Stent Symptom Questionnaire (USSQ), while others present a clear benefit of combination therapies specifically silodosin and solifenacin in treating stent associated Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms (LUTS) than any other type of monotherapy or combination therapy. Many studies suggest that some categories of pharmacotherapy such as alpha blockers can alleviate stent related symptoms. However, there are conflicting evidence concerning most other types of medical treatment. . Randomised trials with largest number of patients are needed to investigate the effectiveness of novel approaches on stent related symptoms. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.