[Treatment of urethral stenosis. 1]

The treatment of urethral strictures has considerably developed over recent years: surgical urethroplasty has been perfected at the same time as internal urethrotomy has gained a new lease of life as a result of endoscopy. Urethral dilatation by means of probes used for arterial stenoses constitutes another interesting development in this field. We reviewed our case files with a double objective in mind: to determine the reasons for our changing therapeutic practices and the results of these three methods. Our study was also interesting because it was the first time that the incidence of this therapeutic development on the economic consequences of this disease, which generally affects professionally active adults, has been assessed. Several factors can be taken into consideration: however, as the length of time off work and the cost of concomitant drug treatments were unable to be determined with sufficient accuracy by our survey, we finally assessed the duration and the number of hospital admissions for each patient. Although only fragmentary, these data appear to reflect fairly accurately the economic impact of the treatments used.