Dr. Richards on exploring environmental risk factors in bladder cancer

In this video, Kyle A. Richards, MD, FACS, highlights potential future work building off of the study, “The impact of Agent Orange exposure on non-muscle invasive bladder cancer outcomes”. Richards is an associate professor of urology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Video Transcript:

We really need to look at environmental exposures, not necessarily Agent Orange. Although we would like to look at Agent Orange exposure in patients with more advanced bladder cancer to also test this hypothesis to see if they had similar or worse outcomes. In the bladder cancer field, there's been a renewed shift on looking at environmental exposures, because although one of the most common risk factors for bladder cancer is smoking, rates of smoking have declined over the past few decades, but rates of bladder cancer have not. So, that tells us that there must be other environmental risk factors out there. I think there's been a renewed interest in that area of work.

My group here at the University of Wisconsin have collaborated with some veterinarians in the vet med school to try to identify other environmental causes. There are certain breeds of dogs, Scottish terriers, for example, that have very high rates of bladder cancer. So, we're working to try to figure out some of the other environmental risk factors to see if we can mitigate those environmental exposures and maybe clean up the environment a little bit more.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.