Christina Ching, MD, on study of follow-up after pediatric stone surgery

In this interview, Christina B. Ching, MD, describes the background and rationale for the study, “Predictors of follow-up of pediatric stone patients after surgical intervention,” for which she served as the senior author. Ching is a clinical associate professor of pediatric urology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Video Transcript:

Our institution was one of the sites of the PKIDS study, which was a multi-institutional study looking at the outcomes of surgical intervention for kidney stones in pediatric patients. It's a really impressive study of, I believe, over 30 institutions that collected their data, looking at all pediatric patients undergoing kidney stone interventions and looking at the comparative effectiveness of those interventions on outcomes of kidney stones. This type of study has never been done before. We were really fortunate to be included as one of the sites.

It was actually my clinical research coordinator who was involved in the study, Nora Thompson. As part of the study, the patients had to come back for follow-up [and] get imaging so we could see the outcome of their surgical intervention. She mentioned to me at times, finding it difficult to get patients to return. So, we started talking about it, and was like, “wouldn't that be great if we could identify if there was something that could predict who would be able to follow up?" We decided to start looking in the literature, and there's not a lot about pediatric patients and what can predict access to care, and particularly, again, follow-up after surgical intervention for kidney stones.

We know that that's important because follow-up allows us to see the outcome of surgery. It allows us to evaluate for any complications after surgery, specifically, if there was maybe silent damage to the urinary tract that could lead to obstruction from their intervention, look at the efficacy of clearing their stones, potential for developing new stones, and an opportunity to start educating patients, if not able to do that before surgery, about their risks for developing future stones. About half of patients who develop kidney stones will have a recurrence within 3 years after developing their stones. We felt like, not only for the study, but for providing good care, that it was important to try and have these patients’ follow-up and see if we could identify factors that might impact their follow-up. From that, we decided to look at our own data and see, over a 5-year period, what our return to clinic visit rate was, and then, out of that, also who went on to get imaging and do some other important elements of follow-up, like completing urine studies to try and address why they made their kidney stone in the first place. That was the rationale and the origin of why we decided to look at what we looked at.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.