Press Release
The Centre for Evidence-based Purchasing reports significant potential and promising results of the Mediplus CT3000 cuff machine for diagnosis of bladder outlet obstruction.
August 2007
The Centre for Evidence-based Purchasing (CEP) is part of the Policy and Innovation Directorate of the NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency. Their role is to underpin purchasing decisions by providing objective evidence to support the uptake of useful, safe and innovative products and related procedures in health and social care; helping with informed purchasing decisions by gathering evidence globally to support the use of innovative technologies, assess value and cost effectiveness of products, and develop nationally agreed protocols.
The report states, “The existing evidence supports the manufacturer’s claim that the CT3000 system has a useful role as an adjunct to current methods assisting in the correct diagnosis of BOO in men. This approach may well reduce the number of ineffective surgical prostatectomies while also reducing the number of invasive studies, both of which carry associated costs and risks.”
The report continues “Current practice leads to a high incidence of misdiagnosis and inappropriate referral for surgery. There is a clear role for a simple, easy-to-interpret, well tolerated, reliable technique that can be used in outpatient clinics to offer better diagnostic accuracy than flow rate measurements alone. Such an approach needs to distinguish between obstructed patients and those who have weak bladder muscle contractility to be of value. This could reduce the number of patients receiving inappropriate surgical intervention, and also reduce the number of patients needing referral to invasive UDS.”
The CT3000 system has significant potential to meet the aim of reducing ineffective surgery while also reducing the reliance on expensive and unpopular invasive studies. The reported surgical success rate is 87% when using the proposed diagnostic approach. The system has been reported to be easy to perform, rapid, inexpensive (the cost of a disposable cuff is £5.80), and is preferred over invasive urodynamics by 80% of patients.
Based on these promising results, reported in peer-reviewed publications, the evidence confirms that the Mediplus CT3000 system shows significant potential for use in outpatient urology clinics. Such use may reduce the proportion of ineffective surgical interventions and also reduce (but not eliminate) the requirement for invasive urodynamic studies. |
