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Men's Health > Penis Health > Cloacal Exstrophy
Cloacal Exstrophy* is a rare birth defect involving
the pelvic area that is termed a malformation sequence and involves
the cloaca** and occurs once in every 250000 births.
While it can affect girls or boys, in boys, they are
typically born without a penis and/or other defects.
This can be so severe that it usually makes adequate reconstruction of
the male genitalia difficult if not impossible, and gender
reassignment has been performed
over the past few decades with many boys born without a penis being
converted surgically into females soon after birth. Their diminished
phalluses were removed and reconstructed as vaginas; their parents
encouraged to raise them as girls, but this has had unfortunate
psychological consequences.
Cloacal Exstrophy is different from Cryptorchidism, a medical term referring to
absence from the scrotum of one or both testes. This usually
represents failure of the testis to move, or "descend," during fetal
development from an abdominal position, through the inguinal canal,
into the ipsilateral scrotum. About 3% of full-term and 30% of
premature infant boys are born with at least one undescended testis,
making cryptorchidism the most common birth defect of male
genitalia. However, most testes descend by the first year of life
(the majority within three months), making the true incidence of
cryptorchidism around 1% overall.
* Exstrophy refers to the eversion of a hollow organ at birth (from
the Greek ex, out, + strophe, a turning). In exstrophy of the cloaca,
an area of the intestine is interposed between two separate areas of
the bladder.
** A cloaca is a common passageway for feces, urine and
reproduction. During human embryogenesis (development), there is for
a time a cloaca. The far end of a structure called the hindgut is
the cloaca before it divides to form a rectum, a bladder, and
genitalia.
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