Study Type -Prevalence (retrospective cohort) Level of Evidence 2b BJUI B J U I N T E R N A T I O N A LWhat's known on the subject? and What does the study add? Shockwave lithotripsy is a common and effective treatment method for kidney stones, but has been associated with long-term complications, namely hypertension and diabetes. We compared the prevalence of these two disease in patients treated with lithotripsy to the background provincial population. Our analyses did not find an association between lithotripsy and the development of these diseases.Shockwave lithotripsy is an effective treatment modality for urolithiasis. The mechanism of stone communition during lithotripsy as well as the acute complications that occur following this treatment have been well described; however, the long-term consequences of this procedure have not been clearly defined. Diabetes and hypertension have been associated with lithotripsy at 19 years follow-up, though this relationship is controversial. This issue is further complicated by the interrelatedness of metabolic dysfunction and stone disease.Our data show that there is no association between lithotripsy and the development of either hypertension or diabetes. Patients treated for urolithiasis 20 years ago with shockwave lithotripsy were contacted, and their prevalence of diabetes and hypertension in these subjects was compared to the background population of British Columbia. The analysis also considered whether the properties of shockwaves delivered by the original Dornier HM-3 versus a modified Dornier HM-3 differentially affected the risk of our subjects developing these diseases. We did not find that lithotripsy, let alone the type of lithotriptor, was a risk factor for developing hypertension and diabetes. We postulate that the development of renal calculi in our subjects is more indicative of an overall metabolic syndrome where there is increasing evidence that patients with kidney stones get hypertension and diabetes and vice-versa. The development of these diseases is not related to shockwave lithotripsy, but rather to a systemic metabolic dysfunction. OBJECTIVES

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