Letter: Multiple renal vessels associated with testicular vessels

Excerpt

We read with great interest the recent paper published by Naito et al. [1] entitled “Multiple renal vessels associated with testicular vessels.” The authors reported five right renal arteries and three left renal arteries arising from the abdominal aorta; both right and left gonadal arteries originated from one of the multiple ipsilateral renal arteries. The report is interesting; however, we would like to add that the statistical proof for the tendency of gonadal arteries to originate from kidneys that possess an accessory arterial supply was first described by our group in a series of 50 healthy individuals in 2007 [2]. In our previous study, we examined angiographic images of 98 kidneys; 39% of the kidneys had at least one accessory renal artery. On 14 sides, the gonadal artery originated from the main or accessory renal artery. Ten out of fourteen kidneys with an aberrant gonadal artery had an associated accessory renal artery. There was a statistically significant association between aberrant renal origin of the gonadal artery and the presence of multiple renal arteries (P = 0.007). We believe that the aberrant origin of the gonadal artery from the renal vasculature is an under-recognized variation. …