Endoscopic management of urethral trauma in male spinal cord injury patients.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) patients with a neuropathic bladder are more prone to develop catheter-induced urethral trauma than occurs in the general population because many of the SCI patients are on indwelling urethral catheter drainage, or intermittent urethral catheterisation is performed either by them or by their carers. The presenting symptoms of improperly positioned Foley catheter in SCI patients may be at times, peculiar to the SCI patients and these include profuse sweating, bypassing of the catheter, increased spasms, or rarely, full fledged features of autonomic dysreflexia. With the availability of the flexible cystoscope, cystourethroscopy has been performed safely on SCI patients who had sustained catheter-induced urethral trauma, on the bedside, with an immediate, and accurate diagnosis of the extent of urethral trauma, and the presence of urethral false passage(s). Further, flexible cystoscopy has helped to treat the patients with urethral trauma by introducing a flexible tip guide wire under vision into the urinary bladder via the normal urethral channel and subsequently, passing a 12 Fr. Foley catheter over the guide wire, thus avoiding the false passage(s) in the urethra. With this technique, it was possible to avert the need for suprapubic urinary diversion in those SCI patients who had sustained acute urethral trauma. Such endoscopic management of acute urethral trauma in SCI patients is described with illustrative case reports of eight patients seen during a 15 month period.