Do stones still kill?
Stone disease still causes death in the 21st century in England and Wales. This trend of increasing deaths must be placed in the context of the concurrent rising incidence of urolithiasis in the UK and the number of stone-related hospital episodes. The primary cause of death relating to complications of stone disease for each individual case should be further investigated to facilitate prevention of complications of urolithiasis.
In conjunction with other studies, our results suggest that there are multiple genetic variants within or near hURAT1 that are associated with susceptibility to HUA in Han Chinese, including a novel SNP located in intron 3.