Crystal-forming activity of urine and methods of its measurement.
Authors:   N. Lopatkin Scientific Research Institute of Urology and Interventional Radiology – branch of the National Medical Research Centre of Radiology of Ministry of health of Russian Federation, Apolikhin O.I. ,   Moscow, Russia, Sivkov A.V. ,   N. Lopatkin Scientific Research Institute of Urology and Interventional Radiology – Branch of the National Medical Research Centre of Radiology of the Ministry of Health of Russian Federation; Moscow, Russia, Golovanov S.A. ,   N. Lopatkin Scientific Research Institute of Urology and Interventional Radiology – Branch of the National Medical Research Centre of Radiology of the Ministry of Health of Russian Federation; Moscow, Russia, Prosyannikov M.Yu. ,   N. Lopatkin Scientific Research Institute of Urology and Interventional Radiology – branch of the National Medical Research Centre of Radiology of Ministry of health of Russian Federation; Moscow, Russia, Voytko D.A. ,   N. Lopatkin Scientific Research Institute of Urology and Interventional Radiology – branch of the National Medical Research Centre of Radiology of Ministry of health of Russian Federation; Moscow, Russia, Anokhin N.V. ,   N. Lopatkin Scientific Research Institute of Urology and Interventional Radiology – Branch of the National Medical Research Radiological Centre; Moscow, Russia, Kudashov I.A. ,   the Department of BMT-3 MSTU. N. Bauman; Moscow, Russia, Shcherbachev A.V. ,   the Department of BMT-3 MSTU. N. Bauman; Moscow, Russia, Pavlov A.V. ,   the Department of BMT-3 MSTU. N. Bauman; Moscow, Russia, Shupenev A.E. ,   the Department of BMT-3 MSTU. N. Bauman; Moscow, Russia, Korshunov I.S. ,   the Department of BMT-3 MSTU. N. Bauman; Moscow, Russia
Published: November 2023

ntroduction. Diagnosis and determination of treatment tactics in patients with urolithiasis are based on determining the causes of lithogenesis. At the moment, the standard of examination in patients at high risk of recurrence of urolithiasis is the detection of metabolic disorders based on the results of a biochemical analysis of blood and daily urine, as well as an assessment of the chemical composition of the urinary stone. The violations determined using this approach are a manifestation of the physico-chemical processes of stone formation, the assessment of which is currently practically not performed by urologists, due to the lack of simple diagnostic methods and tools. Materials and methods. The review was conducted on the basis of data published in PubMed databases (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) and Scientific Electronic Library еLibrary.ru (https://elibrary.ru/), and was limited only to articles in scientific peer-reviewed journals. The search was devoted to the study of the crystal-forming activity of urine, factors affecting the lithogenic properties of urine, as well as methods for assessing the risk of stone formation in the most common metabolic types of urolithiasis. We found 189 sources no older than 10 years (published after 2012) that were relevant to the topic of the review. Conference abstracts, short messages, duplicate publications wereexcluded from them. After that, based on the relevance of the data, reliability of sources, impact factors of journals and the sequence of presentation of the material in the manuscript, 41 articles were selected directly for citation in the review. Also, when writing the review, original articles published before 2012 were used. Results. The analyzed literature sources demonstrated a large number of methods for determining the crystallization properties of urine. However, none of them, in view of the complexity, as well as the ambiguity of the results obtained, have not been widely introduced into clinical practice. In view of this, it is required to develop a simple and informative method for diagnosing the crystal-forming properties of urine, which will increase the percentage of non-reactive urolithiasis. Conclusions. The methods available to doctors for determining the crystal-forming properties of urine are extremely laborious. The development of an easy-to-use and sufficiently accurate real-time determination of the crystallization and anti-crystallization properties of urine, will significantly improve the diagnosis, treatment and metaphylaxis of urolithiasis.