Congenital megalourethra: prenatal diagnosis and postnatal/autopsy findings in 10 cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Congenital megalourethra is a rare urogenital malformation characterized by dilation and elongation of the penile urethra associated with absence or hypoplasia of the corpora spongiosa and cavernosa. Postnatal complications include voiding and erectile dysfunction as well as renal insufficiency and pulmonary hypoplasia. To date, only a few prenatally diagnosed cases have been reported. We report on 10 cases diagnosed prenatally and their postnatal/autopsy findings. METHODS: The study involved retrospective chart review of all cases diagnosed antenatally in three tertiary care centers over 5 years. Antenatal ultrasound images and medical records from obstetrics, genetics, urology and nephrology were reviewed. RESULTS: Ten fetuses with megalourethra were identified at a median gestational age of 19 (range, 13-24) weeks and all were confirmed postnatally or at autopsy. Three pregnancies were terminated and seven continued. All cases presented with a distended bladder and megalourethra and all cases had normal karyotype. Of seven liveborn babies, one died neonatally of pulmonary hypoplasia. All six infants alive at the time of writing had a dysfunctional urethra and three suffered from impaired or end-stage renal disease. Associated anomalies were found in half of the cases. CONCLUSION: Congenital megalourethra is caused by abnormal development or hypoplasia of the penile erectile tissue, secondary to distal urethral obstruction. When the amniotic fluid volume is normal, survival is possible. However, all liveborn infants have voiding and renal dysfunction and sexual dysfunction is expected. Megalourethra should be considered in all male fetuses presenting prenatally with megacystis and detailed fetal ultrasonography should look for an elongated and/or distended phallic structure as well as any associated anomalies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".