Control of urinary bladder function

In normal day-to-day life, the sense of urinary bladder fullness is conveyed to the CNS such that voiding of urine is not too frequent, and retaining urine is not too painful. We believe the key to this issue lies with local – not global – changes in bladder activity during filling. Our overarching concept is that local contractions (“micromotions”) that propagate along the bladder wall are coordinated to cause transient pressure fluctuations (“non-voiding contractions”), and it is this wall deformation, not pressure, that stimulates sensory nerves through stretch-sensitive channels. We have provided many seminal papers on excitation-contraction of urinary bladder smooth muscle including the demonstration that loss of the large-conductance, calcium-sensitive potassium (BK) channels and small conductance, calcium-sensitive potassium (SK3) channels causes overactive bladder and incontinence.