How many degrees of hypospadias are you?

  We often hear patients ask each other, “What degree are you in? If you don’t know much about the disease, you can’t really answer. How is the classification of hypospadias divided, then, today let us analyze it.  We should know that the male genital structure is mainly the urethral opening, glans, coronal sulcus, penis body, scrotum and perineum, and hypospadias is the ectopic urethral opening, which is not normally opened at the tip of the penis head, but at some other location, causing inconvenience in life and some variant deformities in internal development.  Hypospadias is usually typed according to the location of the opening of the urethra and is divided into glans, coronal sulcus, penile body (this type can be further divided into anterior, middle, and posterior), penile scrotum, scrotum, and perineum. The farther away from the normal position of the urethra, the more severe the condition.  We commonly refer to several degrees, generally speaking, the glans type and coronal groove type are classified as degree I, the penile body type as degree II, the penile scrotum type and scrotal type as degree III, and the perineum type as degree IV. Type IV hypospadias of the perineum is the most serious type of this type of disease, and the accompanying complications are more complicated, as well as the development of the organism is mostly abnormal.  Statistics from home and abroad show that the typing of patients with hypospadias is more often type I in foreign countries and type II and III in China, which do not correspond to each other. The reason for this is that a large number of type I cases in China may be missed, or some patients with mild deformities do not seek medical attention in time because they do not affect the quality of life.  Generally speaking, the further the opening of the urethra is from its normal position, the more complicated the condition will be, but it is not absolutely reflected in the severity of comparison with each other, because the individual patient differs, and the specific internal genital development is not reflected in the severity of hypospadias alone, and the emergence of various complications is not uniform, having alternation and complexity of situations.  Of course, there are other terms for suburethral cleft, such as anterior, intermediate, and posterior, but they are not very popular because they do not fit the national expression habits.  Patients (or parents) should have a clear understanding of the specific suburethral cleft typology and understand which type of typology they belong to, and that the treatment methods and surgery costs are not equal for mild and severe conditions, and that patients with severe conditions and complicated complications may need to face staged surgery.