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Dr. Katherine Chan on UNC’s Pediatric Kidney Stone Clinic
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"We provide surgical treatments for kidney stones, and we also help patients manage their stones medically; for example, helping them perhaps with spontaneous passage of their stones," says Katherine Chan, MD, MPH.
In this video, Katherine Chan, MD, MPH, provides an overview of the Pediatric Kidney Stone Clinic at the University of North Carolina. Chan is vice chair for research, director of the Pediatric Kidney Stone Clinic, director of Pediatric Urology Research, and an associate professor of urology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Transcription:
Please provide an overview of the Pediatric Kidney Stone Clinic at the University of North Carolina.
I'm the director of our pediatric stone program at the UNC Department of Urology. I work closely with our staff both in the department of urology as well as the department of medicine, and specifically the pediatric nephrologists who are housed within that department. We have 4 full-time pediatric urologists at UNC, including myself. We also have a team of pediatric nephrologists that's led by Dr. Keisha Gibson. We work closely in partnership with them to provide comprehensive stone care. By that, I mean we provide surgical treatments for kidney stones, and we also help patients manage their stones medically; for example, helping them perhaps with spontaneous passage of their stones. And then we partner with our pediatric nephrology colleagues, who do primarily the metabolic evaluation for children who have kidney stones, and that really focuses on identifying risk factors in terms of why they form the stones, and then they also focus on something called secondary prevention, which is figuring out how to prevent more stones from happening in the future. Supporting this, we also very importantly have 2 wonderful pediatric urology nurses. They help with a lot of the care coordination, which is very important because a lot of these patients require a significant amount of surveillance imaging as well as imaging during their acute stone episodes, and then ordering of lots of testing, such as blood tests and urine tests to help identify those metabolic causes of stone disease.
This transcription was edited for clarity.
