Tiny cystine stones in the gallbladder of a patient with cholecystolithiasis complicating acute cholecystitis: a case report

Abstract

Cystine stones, the main component of which is cystine, are very common urinary calculi, but are rare in the gall bladder. In animals, there has been only one report of cystine gallstones in tree shrews, and to our knowledge, this is the first report of cystine gallstones in humans.

The Systematic Classification of Gallbladder Stones

“…Protein stones were hard in texture, green in color, with clay or mud shapes, and no layer in the profile (Figure 1F). Cystine stones, a new type of gallbladder stone discovered in our previous studies [24], were tiny, amber particles less than 1 mm in size (Figure 1G). Mixed stones were those stones with two or more than two kinds of material components and the content of each component was similar.…”

Cystinuria and cystinosis are usually related to L-cystine: is this really the case for cystinosis? A physicochemical investigation at micrometre and nanometre scale

“…The structural characterisation of cystine kidney stones has been discussed in several publications. Consistent with its crystallographic structure (hexagonal crystal system, P6 1 22 space group), all the papers on synthetic [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] or biological [18][19][20][21]24,55,56,[64][65][66] cystine have reported a hexagonal morphology. On SEM observations, at the micrometre scale, we can clearly see the hexagonal shape of the cystine deposits in kidney stones from mice and humans affected by cystinuria (Figure 2).…”

“…The literature clearly indicates the presence of rectangular crystals made of cystine [29][30][31][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79]81]. Such morphology is not expected for cystine crystals which are typically hexagonal for synthetic [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] as well as for biological [18][19][20][21]24,55,56,[64][65][66] samples. Rectangular-like crystallites are observed in the case of synthetic cysteine (Figure 5c).…”

A microstructural study of gallbladder stones using scanning electron microscopy

“…Cystine stone was a new type of gallbladder stone discovered in our recent studies. The pathogenesis of this stone is not clear (Qiao et al, ). The shape of mixed stones varied according to the different components.…”