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Urachal anomalies in children: surgical or conservative treatment?

Urachal anomalies are rare with an incidence of 1:5000-8000 live births. There is still some controversy as to whether to treat them expectantly or surgically with published reports describing malignant changes in adulthood. These authors describe their retrospective series of...

Torsion of spermatic cord in children

This is an excellent review of ‘testicular’ torsion - which is said to occur in 1:4000 under 25-year-olds. Two age periods (adolescence and neonatal) are identified as having peak incidence. Acute torsion represents 27% of children with acute scrotum. The...

Prostate cancer and an electronic nose

So far the transrectal ultrasound guided (TRUS) biopsy has been the ‘gold standard’ for diagnosing prostate cancer. However, it is invasive and can lead to complications, so there is a need for new non-invasive diagnostic tools to avoid unnecessary biopsy...

Advanced prostate cancer and chemotherapy

The treatment pathway for advanced prostate cancer is both puzzling and complex and varies from centre to centre in the UK. The National Prostate Cancer Audit Report 2019 for England and Wales shows that only a quarter of men with...

Rare and Complex Urology

Diseases that are rare or of low prevalence pose challenges to provision of high-quality care because of limited available knowledge and sparse good-quality evidence regarding uncommon presentations, mechanisms of disease, and optimal treatments. Approximately 80% of rare diseases are of...

Hypospadias – can urologists achieve the unachievable?

US News & World Report (USNWR) provide rankings on a wide range of topics (education, health, money, travel, cars and law firms). In terms of healthcare, they suggest that their rankings (based on metrics) are a tool that can help...

Rotterdam Prostate Cancer Risk app

The widespread use of prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing has led to diagnostic difficulties for patients and urologists. The sensitivity and specificity characteristics of PSA are far from optimal. To try and improve the predictive accuracy of PSA measurements, nomograms...

Software to keep you up to date

Scientific literature continues to expand exponentially, with an average doubling period of 15 years [1]. Staying up to date is an ever-increasing challenge and our time is constantly being consumed by attention-hungry social media platforms, slow NHS IT systems and...

The origins of urinary stone disease

This is a descriptive paper of micro CT scans of tubular mineralisation in 12 nephrectomy specimens. The authors noted that: in the small number of specimens examined, mineralisation started in the outer medulla and appeared to proceed distally along the...

Renal fossa recurrence after nephrectomy for renal cell carcinoma

This paper is an analysis of 36 years of radical nephrectomy for renal cell carcinoma in the Mayo Clinic (1970-2006). In particular, it contains an analysis of the risk of renal fossa recurrence after nephrectomy (partial nephrectomies are not included)...

Understanding gender differences in nephrolithiasis

Rates of nephrolithiasis are higher in males than females. The cause for this remains unclear, however animal models have demonstrated an association between sex steroid hormone levels and lithogenesis. This relationship in humans is less well established. This study from...