The treatment with the device presented recently at the American Urological Association conference showed a 70% lower risk of kidney stone recurrence than the control group | Additional advantages: The treatment is non-invasive and without anesthesia
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An experimental ultrasound device, the development of which took about ten years, succeeded in removing fragments of kidney stones from the body and significantly reduced the risk of recurrence. This was reported by researchers at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association held recently in San Antonio, Texas. The Medscape website reported the positive results of the device, for which an application for approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was submitted.
Dr. Matthew Sorensen, associate professor of urology at the University of Washington in Seattle and director of the Metabolic Stones Clinic at Puget Sound, Virginia, said the risk of kidney stone recurrence was 70 percent lower in a group than in a control group.
"This is an ultrasound-based propulsion procedure unlike anything else that has ever existed. There's nothing else like it," Sorensen said. "It's basically an appointment in a clinic without anesthesia where we use ultrasound energy to focus on the stone fragments and try to push them out of the kidney."
About 20%-30% of patients who undergo surgery to remove kidney stones have fractures that can eventually cause pain that will result in them being admitted to the emergency room or hospital for treatment.
In the new study, 82 patients with stone fragments of five mm or larger were randomly assigned to two groups. One received the treatment Sorensen and colleagues developed and the other was a control group. During a median follow-up of 2.6 years, 20% of patients in the treatment group experienced stone recurrence, compared to 50% of patients in the control group. Recurrence was measured as the future occurrence of urgent medical visits for stone-related symptoms, surgeries or growth of fracture residues as measured by CT two years.
Sorensen and colleagues found that asymptomatic fracture transit was 12 times higher in the treatment group in the first three weeks (60% vs. 5%). Asymptomatic transition was similar in both groups after three weeks. 38% of patients had mild discomfort after the procedure, but it was short-lived and resolved without intervention; 8% of the treatment group and 7% of the control group had blood in their urine.
Dr. David Schulsinger, a clinical professor in the urology department at Stony Brook University Hospital in New York, said patients with stone grains currently have two options: continue surgery or active follow-up. "With this new device, we actually have the potential to do one more thing, and that is to treat these patients non-invasively and without anesthesia," he concluded.
