Surgical and hormonal therapy for cryptorchidism: an overview

The treatment of the undescended testis still engenders controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. To date, there is still no consensus on how to treat a child with an undescended testis. Some physicians advocate surgical therapy of all children whose testes are not located at the bottom of the scrotum whereas others feel that hormonal therapy should be tried initially on all such boys. The following attempts to provide an objective assessment of each of these two therapeutic modalities, highlighting the current controversies.