Morbidity of urodynamic investigation in healthy women

The morbidity of diagnostic catheterization in healthy women has never been described. In order to further elucidate the natural history of postcystometry bacteriuria we studied a group of healthy women without lower urinary tract symptoms. Thirty female volunteers aged 39-72 years underwent urine sampling prior to and at day 3 after invasive urodynamic evaluation. One case of asymptomatic bacteriuria was detected among pretest samples. On post-test sampling 10 of 29 cultures were positive. With a cut-off level of >10(5) CFU/ml only 2 cases could be classified as significant bacteriuria. Only 1 was symptomatic. The remaining 29 women had no symptoms following the examination. Thus the incidence of lower urinary tract infection was 3.3% following repeated diagnostic catheterization. We concluded that although bacteriuria is common after diagnostic catheterization, it is essentially asymptomatic.