A 26-year-old man presented bilateral cysts of the vesicles, larger on the right side, associated with agenesis of right kidney and ureter. Surgical treatment consisted of removal of the right cyst and volume reduction of the left one. The embryological aspects are discussed, together with the clinical findings and the treatment options.

Benign smooth muscle tumors of the female urethra are rare. A case of urethral leiomyoma which had been present for 18 years before surgical removal is reported. The pathogenesis and the clinical aspects of this unusual clinical condition are discussed.

The tumor specimens of 20 patients who underwent radical nephrectomy for nonfamiliar unifocal renal cell carcinoma were evaluated with conventional histopathology, cytogenetic analysis and evaluation of nuclear ploidy with cytofluorometry. The pathological stages were 1 T1N0M0, 10 T2N0M0, 1 T2N+M0, 6 T3N0M0 and 2 T3N+M0. Eleven tumors presented clonal chromosomal abnormalities, 2 had chromosomal instability and 7 normal karyotype. Rearrangement of chromosome 3 was documented in 2 cases only, in contrast with previous observations in the literature. Ten patients had a diploid or peridiploid DNA tumor content, 1 tetraploid, 4 triploid and 5 multiclonal. No correlation was found between nuclear ploidy and karyotype. Chromosomal abnormalities did not impact on survival, while a statistically significant correlation was found with diploid nuclear DNA content, since with a mean follow-up of 45.7 months, 9 out of 10 patients with diploid and peridiploid tumors are alive (p < 0.02), while 8 out of 10 nondiploid died of disease progression.

The prognostic value of nuclear DNA content in 21 patients who underwent conservative surgery for renal tumors was the object of a retrospective study. Cytofluorometric evaluation of nuclear DNA content distribution was performed on smears obtained from 50-µm thick histologic sections prepared with the Hedley technique, using a Leitz MPVII microspectrophotometer. The DNA indexes were plotted in the form of frequency histograms. DNA measurements were repeated by a cell image analysis system (CAS 200; Becton Dickinson) in 16/21 cases. Nuclear DNA content was diploid in 12 cases, triploid in 4, tetraploid in 2 and multiclonal in 3. No statistically significant correlation was found between ploidy and tumor stage and size, using Kendall’s tau test, while there was a significant correlation between tumor ploidy and nuclear grade (p < 0.01). Excluding 2 postoperative deaths, with an average follow-up of 54 months, tumor diffusion was observed in 2 patients (1 with multiclonal and 1 with triploid DNA content) and a local recurrence in a patient with a triploid tumor. Of the remaining 16 no evidence of disease (NED) cases, 10 have a diploid DNA tumor content, 2 diploid, 2 tetraploid and 2 multiclonal. It is concluded that even after conservative surgery for renal neoplasms a diploid DNA content is a favorable prognostic factor. A completely negative prognostic impact of nondiploid tumors is not confirmed, since although all three negative events occurred in this group, there are also 4 NED patients with respectively 70, 46, 43 and 40 months’ follow-up.

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