384 Acute Scrotal Pain and Covid-19 in a Busy Acute Hospital in the UK

Introduction

Published reports highlighted an association between recent COVID-19 infection and testicular pain and infertility.

Aim

To assess the effect of the disease on our surgical practice & scrotal exploration.

Method

We retrospectively analyzed the clinical presentation and surgical outcomes of all patients with sudden onset acute testicular pain who presented to our acute hospital in the period between Jan 2018 till Jan 2022.

Results

Total 335 patients presented with acute scrotum required exploration between 2018-2022 and divided into 2 categories:

[category 1] prior to the start of covid-19 pandemic and [category 2] after the pandemic “≥2020”. The analyses revealed a 13% increase in the number of presentations, though this was not statistically significant [P = 0.09].

The sub-analysis of category 2 looked at the relationship of covid-19 status at the time of presentation with acute pain. This showed a significant correlation between covid-19 +ve status and pain with negative exploration [P = 0.0263].

Table 1: Sub-analysis of the covid-19 status at the time of presentation after 2019. Fisher exact test.

Analyzing the data found to be statistically significant of value of 0.0263 where the result is significant at P<0.05.

Conclusions

Our data show a strong correlation between the covid-19 pandemic and acute scrotal pain that may indicate a viral induced orchitis.