THURSDAY, May 25 (HealthDay News) -- Tamsulosin improves the stone-free rate in patients who have undergone ureteroscopic lithotripsy for treatment of large renal and ureteric calculi, according to the results of a prospective randomized study presented at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in Atlanta.
Sanjay Razdan, M.D., M.C.H., of the Jackson South Community Hospital in Miami, and colleagues enrolled 40 patients undergoing ureteroscopic lithotripsy for 0.8 to 2 centimeter kidney stones. Twenty patients were treated with tamsulosin for four weeks after the procedure, while 20 controls received no drug.
The researchers found that patients treated with tamsulosin had a higher stone-free rate (94.6 percent) than controls (83.1 percent). The patients on tamsulosin whose kidney stones measured more than one centimeter did better, the authors report.
Only 4.3 percent of the patients on tamsulosin experienced ureteric colic while passing stone fragments smaller than 2 millimeters, compared to 23.4 percent of controls, according to the results.
"In our opinion, adjunctive treatment with tamsulosin after ureteroscopic lithotripsy for large renal and ureteric calculi improves stone-free rate as well as patients' quality of life," the authors write. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show the efficacy of adjuvant tamsulosin after ureteroscopic lithotripsy."
Abstract
