Pediatric urologyBladder Wall Thickness in Healthy School-Aged Children
Section snippets
Material and Methods
From February 2003 to May 2003, 287 healthy children recruited from a primary school participated in the study. All the parents provided written informed consent. Children with a history of daytime or nocturnal enuresis, voiding dysfunction, chronic metabolic disease, recurrent urinary tract infection, urinary stone disease, congenital urinary abnormalities, or neurologic disease were excluded from the study. After a complete physical examination, the body weight and height of all children were
Results
Of the 287 children, 43 were excluded from the study because of daytime or nocturnal enuresis, voiding dysfunction, or abnormal urinalysis findings, leaving the data of 244 children (121 girls and 123 boys) to be analyzed statistically.
The mean age was 10.7 ± 3.6 years (range 7 to 15). The bladder volume and detrusor thicknesses from the anterior, posterior, and lateral bladder walls of all children are presented in Table 1.
The thickness of the anterior and posterior bladder wall and bladder
Comment
Different kinds of radiologic imaging modalities can be used in the evaluation of bladder disorders.6 US is a widely used imaging technique to evaluate the bladder volume and monitor disorders of the bladder in children. In addition to being an easily accessible, noninvasive, simple, and fast examination, US does not use ionizing radiation.6 Trabeculation and thickening of the bladder wall can be shown with cystoscopy and cystography but the quantification of bladder wall hypertrophy can be
Conclusions
The evaluation of the anterior and posterior walls of the bladder with transabdominal high-frequency US is a useful method of assessing bladder wall abnormalities. A correlation was found between wall thickness and age. Therefore, the normal values for all age groups should be determined for comparison with pathologic conditions, so that in future studies, the bladder wall thickness in children with urologic abnormalities, which affect the bladder, can be compared with the normal values.
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