What I need to know about Kidney Stones
October 6th 2006 02:53
Recently I was looking into my old emails (as I need to clear them anyway) I saw this interesting article that my friend sent to me. Many people, especially children these days, don’t like to drink water and this will cause kidney stones. I remembered when I was 10 I had the similar problem but since it was an early stage I get to clear it out of my system. Now I do my best to drink water regularly and remind myself the pain I went through when I was a kid… it was so bad that I had to lie down and couldn’t move. That was how painful it was.
Anyway, there will be posts about the overview of it and some questions about when you should be looking for a doctor about a signs kidney stone on you.
Definition of Kidney Stone
Extracted from MedicineNet.com
What is a kidney stone?
A kidney stone is a hard mineral and crystalline material formed within the kidney or urinary tract.
Kidney stones are a common cause of blood in the urine and pain in the abdomen, flank, or groin. Kidney stones occur in 1 in 20 people at some time in their life.
The word "kidney stone"
The process of stone formation is called nephrolithiasis or urolithiasis. "Nephrolithiasis" is derived from the Greek nephros- (kidney) lithos (stone) = kidney stone"Urolithiasis" is from the French word "urine" which, in turn, stems from the Latin "urina" and the Greek "ouron" meaning urine = urine stone. The stones themselves are also called renal calculi. The word "calculus" (plural: calculi) is the Latin word for pebble.
Etiology
Conventional wisdom has held that consumption of too much calcium can aggravate the development of kidney stones, since the most common type of stone is calcium oxalate. However, strong evidence has accumulated demonstrating that low-calcium diets are associated with higher stone risk and vice-versa for the typical stone former.
Other examples of kidney stones include struvite (magnesium, ammonium and phosphate), uric acid, calcium phosphate, or cystine (found only in people suffering from cystinuria). The formation of struvite stones is associated with the presence of urease splitting bacteria (Klebsiella, Serratia, Proteus, Providencia species) which can split urea into ammonia, most commonly Proteus mirabilis.
A lack of the protein calgranulin is blamed by some for the appearance of calcium oxalate stones.
| 27 |
| Vote |
Subscribe to this blog
