Renal Tuberculosis

Abstract

THIS serious complication of tuberculosis can now almost always be controlled with nonoperative therapy. Persistent specific chemotherapy, combined with conscientious monitoring by cystoscopic, x-ray and laboratory examinations, has gradually permitted medicines to supplant the knife, in the years since 1946. Eighteen years of faithful follow-up observations on several hundred cases of this relatively rare disease by the Research Unit for Genitourinary Tuberculosis of the Kingsbridge Veterans Administration Hospital and the Columbia University Department of Urology appear to justify this position. For example, in one group of 333 patients in whom the effects of chemotherapy alone could be well evaluated, it . . .