Kidney stones
Kidney stones are surprisingly common, especially in men – about 1 in 8 men and 1 in 16 women will have them at some point. What’s more, once you’ve had one, you’re more likely to get another. While they can be excruciatingly painful, there are steps you can take to reduce your risk – and they are treatable.
Of course, kidney stones aren’t actually made of the same stone as pebbles on the beach – you form them yourselves from tiny crystals in your urine which clump together. More and more calcium gradually builds up around that initial “seed” of crystals to form a stone, usually made of calcium.
Even if you do have a kidney ki stone made of ca alcium, the levels of c alcium in your bloodstream b are likely to o be normal. However, if f you get dehydrated, your y urine will be more concentrated. c That means m more calcium.
And if you take your mind back to school chemistry lessons, you’ll remember that very concentrated solutions become “super-saturated” – the liquid can’t keep all the chemicals dissolved.
As well as not drinking enough fluids, losing too much fluid through sweat can make you prone to dehydration. You sweat more in very hot weather, if you’re exercising very hard, or have a fever. So can diuretics (water tablets), usually given for high blood pressure or heart failure, and some forms of chemotherapy.
Kidney stones can run in families. Having repeated kidney or bladder infections or having an underlying problem with your kidney, such as cysts or scarring, also increases your risk. Rarely, kidney stones are down to a medical condition that leads to high levels of calcium or other chemicals like uric acid (also linked to gout) or oxalate.
The symptom everyone knows about where kidney stones are concerned is pain. But in fact, kidney stones often don’t cause pain while they’re in the kidneys. The most common reason for symptoms from kidney stones comes if they start to travel out of your body down one of your ureters – the tubes that connect your kidneys and bladder.
Sometimes, if a stone gets stuck in your kidney, it can cause severe pain in your loin (the small of your back on one side) along with being sick and sweatiness. Kidney stones also make you more prone to urine infections, burning when you
DEHYDRATION INCREASES THE RISK OF KIDNEY STONES, AS WELL AS THE RISK OF THEM RETURNING, SO DRINK PLENTY OF WATER
go to the loo, needing to rush to the loo, cloudy urine and having to get up at night.
However, the more common pain is “renal colic”. Because the ureter is a small tube, the stone can get stuck on its way down the ureter to the bladder. As the muscles in the wall of the ureter try to squeeze it out, you can get severe colicky pain. This comes and goes in waves and makes you want to roll around! However, you may have a dull ache in your loin between bouts of pain.
The pain often starts in your loin and travels to your groin or lower tummy on one side. You may also feel sweaty and sick, or be sick. As the stone rubs against the inside of the ureter it can make it raw, so you may notice blood in your urine too. The pain can last minutes to hours – it settles once the stone has passed into your bladder.
You often don’t need more treatment once you’ve passed a kidney stone – you may need painkillers for a few days. However, if you have repeated problems – or if a stone gets stuck in the ureter and symptoms don’t settle – you may need further treatment.
Options include surgery to remove a single stone, but this is rare. More often these days you’ll be offered “extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy”. Lithotripsy is the medical word for breaking up a stone, and high-energy shock waves, directed from outside your body, are used for this. Once the stone has broken into tiny pieces, your body will usually pass it out with no problems.
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