Kids Kidney Research

Routine antenatal ultrasound examinations identify abnormalities of the fetal urinary tract in about 0.5% of pregnancies. One of the most serious of these anomalies is called ‘posterior urethral valves’ (PUV). It is a disease unique to boys and accounts for major postnatal suffering with incontinence of urine and progressive renal failure occurring even after surgery has been performed in early life to destroy the valve.

Although antenatal surgical decompression of the blocked urinary tract is feasible, there exist no randomised, prospective trials to prove efficacy in terms of preserving urinary tract function. Hence there is a need for an animal model with which to study the disease.

The current application proposes studies on such a model, in sheep, which will correlate abnormal pressures generated within obstructed fetal bladders, with the growth and muscle function of these organs.

In the longer term, these studies will lay the foundations with which to experimentally test the hypothesis that surgically-decompressing the obstructed bladder prior may be able to lessen or prevent damage to the growing urinary tract and improve postnatal outcomes.