Doctors at Bình Dân Hospital in HCM City remove renal stones from a child patient. —Photo courtesy of the hospital

HCM CITY — Doctors at HCM City’s Bình Dân Hospital performed for the first time ultra-mini-percutaneous nephrolithotomy on three child patients to remove kidney stones without much bleeding or damage to tissues.

Percutaneous nephrolithotomy is an advanced procedure in which a scope is inserted through a small incision in the patient’s back to remove the stones.

Because the incision was a mere 5 millimetres, the patients recovered quickly and without a scar.   

The children aged three, six and seven were brought to the hospital with chronic pain in their hip and back and frequent urinary infections.

If the ultra-mini-percutaneous nephrolithotomy had not been performed, an open surgery would have been carried out, causing much pain to the patients.

They had been brought from a paediatric hospital in the city to Bình Dân, which has done more than 1,000 percutaneous nephrolithotomy surgeries on adults since 1997.  

Dr Nguyễn Phúc Cẩm Hoàng, deputy head of the hospital, said treatment of renal stones in child patients is very complex, requiring doctors to carefully consider whether to remove all the stones while ensuring the kidneys continue to function normally.

Open surgeries to remove renal stones are common at health facilities around the country, but patients recover slowly and there is a risk of damage to kidney functions, he explained.

The hospital’s doctors performed the ultra-mini-percutaneous nephrolithotomy using an C-arm X-ray machine and laser stone crushing machine.

The surgeries took less than an hour each with the hospital’s doctors collaborating with colleagues from Children’s Hospital 1.

The patients recovered and were discharged.

Urinary stones are common among adults, but children also suffer from them, Hoàng said.

The causes in children could be congenital, disorders related to metabolism and others.

Hoàng said eating too much fast food with their high salt and protein content, drinking insufficient water and lack of physical activity are thought to cause kidney stones.  

Children with stones have symptoms like frequent urination, especially at night, lower abdominal pain, a burning sensation or pain in the urethra when urinating, and bloody or cloudy urine.

Young children with urinary stones often cry and have fever though many show no symptoms.

Parents should give children sufficient water and many different kinds of foods and restrict salty foods, Hoàng said.

When children have any of the above symptoms, they should be taken to a doctor, he added. — VNS