Alan Wein: Hello again. I'm Alan Wein from UroToday, and it's my great pleasure to have the opportunity to interview Melissa Kaufman, who chaired the AUA Guideline Committee on genitourinary syndrome of menopause. I think something that, is a phrase that a lot of us repeat perhaps when we see patients, but I'm not sure that anyone has a clear understanding of what it means until after Melissa gives a talk about it. 

So, I've asked her actually previously a number of questions that I thought the audience would like to be answered by her, and she's put most of these or all of these actually together in a pretty comprehensive summary of the guidelines and pointed out these questions and actually given answers. And anything that I think hasn't been answered, we can talk about basically at the end. But I think that you'll find her presentation and the answers to the questions that I'll ask at the end really compelling, and hopefully we'll be able to help everybody's practice in this regard. So Melissa, fire away.

Melissa Kaufman: Well, Dr. Wein, thank you so much for that incredibly gracious introduction. It's all about the shoulders of giants, so if I can follow in your footsteps in any way, then we've done a great service to urology. And I'm really very delighted for this opportunity to discuss these newly released guidelines from the AUA on Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause, which we'll refer to as GSM. Really, on behalf of the millions of patients that are going to benefit from this landmark endeavor, I want to express personally my deep appreciation to the AUA for a very courageous decision to sponsor development of this guideline. So we're going to talk about prevalence, we'll discuss something about the diagnosis and the physical changes and treatment strategies and some complications of those treatment strategies that may arise, particularly with regards to patient counseling.

So, let us begin. This is actually the QR code for the guidelines. So for everyone who would like to access them directly, just put up your phones and you can get straight to the AUA guidelines for our GSM from this QR code. And when we developed the guidelines, we actually came up with 26 statements. They're related to shared decision-making, which we have a singular guideline just to discuss what that actually entails for this preference-sensitive condition. We talk about screening, diagnosis, hormonal and non-hormonal interventions, energy-based interventions, which is always a question. We'll discuss the implications for breast and endometrial cancer and surveillance, and then what we need to think about with follow-up. And so in this brief synopsis, utilizing some questions that were posed to me by Dr. Wein, I just wanted to hit the highlights of these guidelines, but I do encourage everyone to read the document in its entirety to get the full spectrum of answers to all these very salient points.