The LURN Study—What Have We “LURN”ed So Far?

LURN was established by the NIDDK to study LUTS with a holistic approach, focusing on urinary urgency. LURN has developed patient-reported outcome instruments to better measure LUTS in men and women. LURN SI-29 can be used for clinical research. LURN SI-10 can be adopted for everyday use in clinic. LURN SI-10 offers distinct advantages over the AUA-SI. In addition to voiding and storage symptoms, LURN SI-10 also measures SUI, UUI, painful bladder filling, and post-void dribbling. LURN has studied the roles of non-urologic factors in LUTS. For example, central obesity and high BMI are associated with worse UUI, SUI, and OAB symptoms. Depression, sleep disturbance, and poor physical function are associated with worse UI and voiding symptoms. Exposure to childhood sexual trauma is common and is associated with worse UI. LURN has conducted the largest neuroimaging studies to date on persons with urinary urgency. Increased functional connectivity between the pre-frontal cortex and somatosensory cortex to specific brain networks was demonstrated in urgency patients compared to controls. Increased microstructural disruption to specific brain white matter tracts was also noted in urgency patients compared to controls. LURN has developed novel, unbiased, and data-driven clustering tools to subgroup LUTS patients. Five male clusters and five female clusters were identified. LURN has also developed a large biorepository linked to rich clinical phenotyping data. Over 100 000 biospecimens (blood, serum, urine) were collected. Subtyping efforts of OAB patients in LURN II using machine learning/clustering approaches are ongoing. Clinical trials registration: LURN I Study: NCT02485808. LURN II Study: NCT04557748.