Devicare and Premier Medical Ltd organised a workshop dedicated to providing an overview of the latest advances in the treatment and clinical handling of lithiasis or kidney stones, on 7 October in Dublin, which was attended by prestigious urologists and Irish health care professionals.
The presentation was led by Vera Griffin, Managing Director of Premier Medical Ltd., who remarked that 50,000 cases of urinary lithiasis are diagnosed in Ireland each year, with a recurrence rate of over 60% of patients, principally men.
The guest speaker at the event was Dr Juan M. López Martínez, a urologist from Barcelona's Hospital Clínic and the Teknon Medical Centre. Dr López explained that the most revolutionary solution that we have today to prevent and treat kidney stones and double-J stent encrustation is a new medical device that measures the patient's urinary pH (Lit-Control® pH Meter), which offers the best diagnostic performance in terms of sensitivity, specificity, precision, as well as positive and negative predictive power compared to other pH measurement systems such as automatic reagent strip analysers, while also allowing for improved patient follow-up by increasing their adherence to the treatment. This tool is complemented with nutraceuticals created specifically to prevent the formation of stones by modulating urinary pH and inhibiting the crystallisation cascade.
The combination of potassium citrate with theobromine was also presented in the workshop as a new medical treatment for uric acid lithiasis, demonstrating superior results compared to the benchmark treatment due to its dual action mechanism based on alkalinising urine in order to make the uric acid crystals soluble and inhibiting their growth. The results from the clinical study led by Dr Felix Grases from the University of the Balearic Islands with the collaboration of Devicare concerning this solution are expected in the upcoming months.
Rosendo Garganta, CEO of Devicare, commented that “our company is the first Digital Therapeutics company in Urology, and as such it is strongly committed to continuing to develop new medical treatments in the field of urology based on managing patients' urinary pH”.
Premier Medical is the official distributor of Lit-Control® products in Ireland. The workshop offered physicians the opportunity to get to know first-hand these first-in-class products and their clinical evidence which are already recommended by leading international urologists.
De Coninck, V., Keller, EX., Rodríguez-Monsalve, M., Haymann, JP., Doizi, S., Traxer, O. (2018). Evaluation of a portable urinary pH meter and reagent strips. Journal Endourology. doi: 10.1089/end.2018.0202
