Abstract

INTRODUCTION Anatomical variation of accessory renal artery has a great clinical importance especially in surgical operations. This issue might bring different complications during surgeries. The prevalence of these variations have been reported differently among populations. Here in this paper, we aimed to have a study on frequencies of anatomical variation of renal arteries. METHODS This cross-sectional study was performed on 129 patients who were referred to Imam Khomeini hospital-Tehran in order to perform multislice computed tomography angiography using multiple detector computed tomography (MDCT) of kidneys in 2018-2019. Data were assessed by expert radiologists regarding to renal arteries, characteristics of both side arteries, number of accessory arteries and locations of these arteries based on patient's gender. RESULTS Here we reported at least one accessory artery in 15.5 percent of right and 17.1 percent of left kidneys. The diameter of left accessory artery was in 14.3 percent of cases equal to the main artery and in 85.7 percent of cases, smaller. We also showed that all of the right accessory arteries were smaller than the main renal artery. We indicated no significant difference between frequencies of total arteries of right and left kidneys. CONCLUSION There was a large variety of renal accessory arteries with high frequency among our study population. This issue has a great surgical importance especially for urologists and we suggest further studies on larger populations should be performed in order to assess frequency of accessory renal artery in Iranian population.