Emphysematous pyelonephritis is a rare but life threatening infection of kidney that is characterized by gas formation within or around the kidney. We describe a case of emphysematous pyelonephritis as a consequence of inadequately treated pelvic-ureteric stone in a diabetic man and complement this with a brief review of the literature pertaining in particular to the management of this condition.
In Malaysia, COVID-19 pandemic recorded considerable number of cases. Many hospitals have been converted into COVID-19 centres to manage these cases. The Penang General Hospital was designated as a hybrid hospital to manage both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases. Consequently, services across specialties, including urology have been affected. Triage of referrals was necessary to ensure optimum patient care, thus we designed a triage system to address this situation. A record screening system of patients was also implemented to limit outpatient appointments. We share this early experience in managing urology patients during this pandemic.
We adapted the English International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF) into Malay. This was difficult as many sex-related terms do not exist in colloquial Malay. In the pretest, there was no difficulty with comprehension and all subjects judged the Malay IIEF equivalent to the English IIEF. After slight modification, a final instrument was evaluated in two studies. Study A included 136 subjects. It showed that the instrument had good reliability and discriminant validity. The factor structure of the English IIEF was not reproducible. Study B included 26 ED subjects who underwent oral sildenafil therapy. The Malay IIEF was sensitive to treatment response. The area under the ROC curve of the Malay IIEF-5 was 0.86; the optimal cutoff score has a sensitivity of 85% and specificity of 75%. The results suggest that the Malay IIEF requires more work, but the Malay IIEF-5 has acceptable measurement properties to recommend its use in clinical practice and research.