Ureteral Stents

Hi, I am Karen Stern, a urologist at Mayo Clinic, Arizona,

and a member of the Kidney Stone Collaborative.

One question I’ve been tasked

to answer is about the ureteral stent.

Now, the stent to some people sounds more painful

than the stone itself.

Why do we use them? Why are they necessary?

These are all really good questions.

The stent is a small plastic tube

that has a little curl in the kidney,

and it goes all the way down the ureter

with another curl in the bladder.

The reason for the stent is to allow everything to heal up,

and it’ll allow urine to flow unobstructed from the

kidney down to the bladder.

You can think about it as your ureter is a very small tube.

That’s why small stones get stuck.

So with the scope going up

and down, it can cause a little bit of swelling,

a little bit of swelling, and a small tube

can cause it to close off.

Therefore, the stent is just there to protect you,

to make sure that you’re unobstructed

and that everything heals as it should.

Now, it can be really uncomfortable,

but it’s not necessarily uncomfortable for everyone.

A lot of people who have bad experiences with stents,

those are the people who go online and write their reviews.

If people have a stent and it doesn’t bother them that much,

they’re not gonna go online and

write about their experience.

I usually frame it like this.

If I put a stent in a hundred patients,

10 patients don’t feel them at all.

We do actually have patients who forget to get them out.

10 patients are absolutely miserable.

80% of patients are annoyed.

You will feel like you have to pee a lot.

You might have blood in the urine.

When you do have to urinate, you’re gonna get some urgency,

frequency, some pain,

but it’s more of an annoyance than an absolute misery.

You can go about your daily life.

There are no activity restrictions.

It’s just one of these things that you kind of get used to,

and by the time you get used to it, it comes out.

We do try to leave it in the least

amount of time as possible.

The duration of the stent is really different for everybody,

for the patient, for the stone, for the surgeon,

there are a lot of different factors that go into it.

In terms of medication for stent, you know, tolerance, uh,

that’s really different too.

But there’s been a lot of research that shows

that narcotics do not necessarily help

anti-inflammatories, help.

Tylenol helps tamsulosin med medicines

to help decrease bladder spasms.

All these medications can help

and your doctor can work with you to find a combination

that works best for you.