Prenatal Anogenital Distance Is Shorter in Fetuses With Hypospadias

Abstract

Fetuses with hypospadias have a statistically significant shorter anogenital distance compared with the general population. Therefore, anogenital distance may serve as a complementary objective sonographic parameter in the prenatal assessment and counseling of male external genital anomalies.

Anogenital distance and reproductive outcomes in 9‐ to 11‐year‐old boys: the INMA‐Granada cohort study

“…As a measure of reduced androgenization during fetal life, shortened AGD in males may be related to genital tract malformations. In fact, reduced AGD has been associated with cryptorchidism and hypospadias in human fetuses and infants (Swan et al ., ; Hsieh et al ., , ; Jain & Singal, ; Thankamony et al ., ; Gilboa et al ., ), indicating that both reduced AGD and male genital anomalies may have a common etiology, namely abnormal androgen signaling in utero (Welsh et al ., ; van den Driesche et al ., ). Cryptorchidism at birth or follow‐up was not associated with AGD in early puberty in the present study.…”

“…Thus, several studies in groups of volunteers or men attending andrology clinics have published evidence linking shorter AGD with worse sperm quality (Mendiola et al ., , ; Eisenberg & Lipshultz, ), reduced fertility (Eisenberg et al ., ), azoospermia (Eisenberg et al ., 2012b), and lower testosterone and estradiol levels (Eisenberg et al ., 2012a; Zhou et al ., ). In adults, a shorter AGD has been also related to the risk of prostate cancer (Castaño‐Vinyals et al ., ), while in male human fetuses, newborns, and infants, it has been associated with hypospadias, cryptorchidism, micropenis, and reduced thyroid hormone levels (Hsieh et al ., , ; Jain & Singal, ; Thankamony et al ., ; Liu et al ., ; Gilboa et al ., ).…”

Experimentally induced testicular dysgenesis syndrome originates in the masculinization programming window

“…Hence, AGD could be measured at any postnatal age in rats and used to retrospectively decipher the level of fetal androgen exposure during the MPW (11,21). In human males, AGD shows similar male-female differences as in rats (11,(24)(25)(26), and lower AGD has been related to the occurrence of TDS disorders evident at birth (27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33) and, in a majority of studies, to lower sperm counts (34)(35)(36)(37) and hormone levels (38,39) in adult men, similar to rats (reviewed in ref. 11).…”

Prenatal imaging of genital defects: clinical spectrum and predictive factors for severe forms

“…The repartition of phenotypes is not significantly different between the 1985–1995 vs the 1996–2005 periods ( P = 0.55, Fisher's exact test) and vs the 2006–2017 period ( P = 0.09). Studies included in this figure are .…”

“…Recent studies are even more likely to face this variability, as minor phenotypes that were rarely detected in the past are more commonly identified before birth today (Fig. 3) [8, [10][11][12]15,[19][20][21][30][31][32][33][34][35]. Despite this wide clinical variability, the PPV of prenatal screening has improved.…”