Spinal Cord’s Role in Urination Mapped, Opening Door to Incontinence Treatments

Real-time spinal monitoring reveals how the nervous system helps regulate bladder function.

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Scientists can now predict when someone is about to urinate just by watching their spinal cord activity—a first-of-its-kind discovery that could lead to targeted treatments for millions of Americans who have lost bladder control.

“The spinal cord is a very undiscovered area,” Vasileios Christopoulos, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), said in a statement.

Spinal Cord Activity Linked With Urination

Recently published in Nature Communications, researchers used a type of imaging technology called functional ultrasound imaging, which tracks blood flow changes in the nervous system, to observe how different regions of the spinal cord respond as the bladder fills and empties.