Special features

Urological emergencies — causes, symptoms and management

By Ziad Al Rifai, MRPharmS, and Adriece Ayub, MRPharmS, DipClinPharm

Acute urological emergencies are often serious complaints requiring life-saving treatment. This article describes the most common urological emergencies encountered in hospital and how they are managed

This article as a PDF (100K)

Ziad Al Rifai is a pharmacist and final year medical student at Leicester and Warwick Universities

Adriece Ayub is a senior medicines information pharmacist at Birmingham City Hospital

David Mack/SPL

Benign prostatic hyperplasia

Benign prostatic hyperplasia can cause acute urinary retention

Panel 1: Common urological emergencies

• Renal colic
• Acute urinary retention
• Priapism
• Spinal cord compression
• Testicular torsion
• Paraphimosis
• Ruptured urethra

SUMMARY

A significant proportion of the urological complaints seen in hospitals are acute urological emergencies.

These complaints require immediate, often life-saving treatment — either surgical intervention or pharmacological management.

In many cases there is an underlying disease that can trigger a urological complaint.

Panel 1 lists the most common urological emergencies. This article will focus on three of these:

acute urinary retention
renal colic
spinal cord compression

The following article describes the pharmacological treatment of these conditions.

Full text article PDF (100K)