A Mini-Review of Shock Wave Lithotripsy and Its Role in Urological Treatment of Kidney Stones

Background: It is estimated that 1 in 11 people will experience symptoms for kidney stones within their lifetime, in which men are marginally affected more than women. As there are a range of treatment options available to treat kidney stones, it is important to understand surgical trends in relation to cost-effectiveness of each treatment, to allow the best advice to be given to the patient when deciding which treatment option is in their best interest.

Methodology: Common search engines were used including PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar, employing MeSH terms, including extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy, kidney stones and complications. Specific search engine tools were used to narrow the range of publication to no more than 10 years old, and to favour review articles over common research articles to search for non-specific epidemiologic statistics.

Results: From 27 identified studies, 6 studies could be compared side by side covering a large range of populations including Australia, Canada, England, Korea and America. All regions saw an increase in incidence for kidney stones ranging from 0.37% to 4.37% per year. In addition, changes in elected treatment for saw significant changes for not only shock wave lithotripsy, flexible ureteroscopy and percutaneous nephrolithotomy saw increases and decreases respectively.

Conclusion: The rising incidence of kidney stones is attracting major attention in clinical and research areas, due to rising obesity, poor dietary habits and lack of adequate fluid intake across the world. Although the number of SWL procedures is decreasing, many studies show this is due to extensive knowledge about the limitations and complications of the procedure. Further research is anticipated to overcome current limitations for SWL treatment and therefore should be monitored in the future.