[Masks of urogenital tuberculosis as the cause of diagnostic errors]

Urogenital tuberculosis does not have pathognomonic symptoms, so diagnostic errors are quite common. This systematic review of literature was conducted to identify the causes and estimate the incidence of erroneous diagnoses. We critically evaluated some articles in which the authors describe observations of urogenital tuberculosis as rare and unusual because they never encountered this disease, but in fact that were typical manifestations of genitourinary tuberculosis. The authors analyzed and illustrated the features of urinary tuberculosis in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis, differential diagnosis of urogenital tuberculosis and kidney cancer and male genitourinary organs, described errors in the diagnosis of urethral, testicular, penile, prostatic and epididymal tuberculosis. Urolithiasis was described as a mask and concomitant disease of urogenital tuberculosis. Really rare forms of bladder tuberculosis as the cause of diagnostic errors are described. Examples of fatal outcomes of urogenital tuberculosis are given. The authors analyzed cases of granulomatous interstitial nephritis due to tuberculosis infection and tuberculosis of the renal artery as the cause of renovascular hypertension. The most common causes of late diagnosis of urogenital tuberculosis are the absence of a typical pattern and the tendency to manifest under the guise of other diseases.