[Varicocele in childhood and adolescence and other testicular anomalies: an epidemiological study]

Although in the last years varicocele has being recognized with increasing frequency in the adolescents, it is still neglected in pediatric age. Recently several epidemiologic studies revealed an increasing incidence of varicocele in patients between 10 and 16 years, as high at the end of puberty as that of the adult male population. Our study has been carried out on 9861 students, aged between 11 and 18 years, in order to evaluate the effective incidence of the varicocele in pediatric and adolescent age and, at the same time, disclose other possible testicular anomalies in so called "normal" boys. Our study showed that the incidence of varicocele is related to sexual maturation and is time-related with a final incidence of 16%. Left testicular hypotrophy is rather common in primary varicocele and is also time and grade related. Cryptorchidism has been found in 2% of the examined students; 0.4% of them have not been yet operated on. We have been able to discover a rather high incidence of retractile testes (4.7%), always associated with testicular hypotrophy. Finally 7.5% of our examined students presented an unilateral testicular hypotrophy (volume less than 30% of the contralateral normal testis) in complete absence of local pathology.