Kidney Stones
Options
Replies
-
Thanks for the well-wishes and entertainment.
I think ACV is probably as good as lemon juice. Evidence seems to point to citric acid binding to Ca as the factor more than effects on urine pH.0 -
I hope it passes soon. The pain I had was like nothing I had experience.0
-
Oh no. I'm so sorry to hear this news. I hope you're feeling better.
I haven't experienced this before and don't know if this works with your diet but supposedly it will break up the stones . . .
http://www.amazon.com/Planetary-Herbals-Stone-Tablets-tablets/dp/B00C7XUZN0/ref=sr_1_1?rps=1&ie=UTF8&qid=1440373587&sr=8-1&keywords=kidney+stones&pebp=1440373643979&perid=09W81786DKAX0NAMH8CZ
Hope you feel lots better soon and are home from the hospital.0 -
Kidney stone pain is some of the worst pain I ever treated patients for during the time I worked in the ER. Bless you for that terrible experience! This is another case of finding what causes them for you. Then eliminating the substance, or circumstances, that lead to the stone formation. I hope you can retrieve the stone and have it analyzed. That will surely help, just knowing what it's made of. Hope you get better fast!0
-
Good info on stone formation here:
http://kidneystones.uchicago.edu/how-much-is-enough/
In a nutshell, a stone is formed via supersaturation by the kidney. These guys measured concentrations of CaOx and CaP and determine how much urine flow is needed to keep concentrations below supersaturation, and then estimated intake to maintain that flow.
Fasting, 2 hours, at 5 ounces an hour, 10.5 ounces (0.3 liter) total.
Fed, 14 hours from first meal to bedtime, we need 14 * 5.25 = 73 ounces (2.1 liters) total.
Overnight, 8 hours, at 5 ounces an hour, 40 ounces (1.2 liters) total.
Altogether this makes 123 ounces (3.6 liters) of fluid intake a day in this example. One can calculate for the fasting, fed, and overnight periods of a patient to obtain a more refined estimate.
So they argue it's all about fluid intake, and you need to drink a LOT to avoid stone formation.0 -
Researching kidney stones has exhausted me.
My friends and family are convinced that my "crazy diet" was the cause of my stone. They may be right.
Probably the best analysis is from Paul Jaminet:
http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2010/11/dangers-of-zero-carb-diets-iv-kidney-stones/
I'm not going to summarize it, and his conclusions may be wrong. The only thing he got right for sure was this:
A 100-fold odds ratio is hardly ever seen in medicine. There must be some fundamental cause of kidney stones that is dramatically promoted by clinical ketogenic diets.
Just over half of ketogenic diet kidney stones are composed of uric acid and just under half of calcium oxalate mixed with calcium phosphate or uric acid. Among the general public, about 85% of stones are calcium oxalate mixes and about 10% are uric acid. So, roughly speaking, uric acid kidney stones are 500-fold more frequent on the ketogenic diet and calcium oxalate stones are 50-fold more frequent.
So the biggest increase in risk is for uric acid stones, probably due to the increased uric acid load and acidic urine from protein metabolism on some ketogenic diets.
In my case, my urine was alkaline, and I wasn't on a hard-core ketogenic diet. I think the content of my diet was a minor factor.
I think it was fluid levels. I ran 5 days a week. I would lose 2lbs of water via sweat during a run.
But my urine was never dark, and I drank a lot of water, so WTH?
Ready for my theory? This could be wrong, of course. We all lose water weight on a low-carb diet. Sure, part of it is due to glycogen stores being burned out, but most of it is due to sodium loss.
Why do we lose sodium? Because we have ketones in our urine, and the ketone anions get covered by sodium cations. Sodium blood concentration is TIGHTLY regulated, so our body has to dump water to maintain blood sodium concentration.
We end up with less sodium, less blood volume (water), and higher CONCENTRATIONS of other solutes in the urine.
Like I said, I could be wrong, but I think the water weight we lose is possibly a kidney stone risk.0 -
I don't know how much pain you must have been in, I've never had kidney stones but did have gall stones for 8 years. Many of them passed into my bile duct where they remained until they were surgically removed. Worst f-ing pain ever, I was apparently pretty heavily sedated but screamed and screamed for the 40 minutes it took to shove 'em through. Screaming with a camera down your throat is pretty hard haha.
I never ever want a stone of any sorts again in my life so I'm watching this with great interest. I spent way too many years lying on my side crying and vomiting from the stupid gallstones. I'd rather eat donurs than have stones. A million times over.0 -
I agree with you. If the CIA ever uses kidney stones as a torture device, all of our enemies will gladly divulge their secrets to us.
Jaminet uses this as one of the reasons he recommends a carb minimum of around 200g/d. That's probably not going to fly very well around here.
One of the things running does to a low-carber, besides dehydration, is produce MEGA ketones, so a bunch of them end up in your urine.
If I'm right, then it's best to minimize ketones in the urine. Or, if you insist on peeing out a lot of ketones, you've got to eat a bunch of sodium (which Jaminet also recommends).
The recommendation for salt is contrary to the standard medical advice for kidney stones, but I think we need it.0 -
Any excuse to eat salt and be a couch potato sounds good to me. Not that I can run far enough to ever get dehydrated but I often ignore thirst. I should see if the hospital will send me a pic of my bile stones, there was so many they said they'd use the picture for teaching medical students.
How are you feeling now? Are you in agony? And exploded kidney sounds excruciating.
200g of carbs might be a wee bit high for stumpy lumps such as myself but for an active man it sounds good.0 -
I may try to increase my carbs a bit, but not that much. Just talked to my Dad, who said he had two of them, so genetics is obviously a factor for me.
Pain isn't too bad, but my doc says there's a low probability of passing it on my own, so surgery is scheduled for Oct (to give the kidney a chance to heal first).
I wish us both a long and happy stone-free future. 0 -
Just catching up on this thread. @ wabmester, I'm sorry to hear about your kidney stone ordeal! Thanks so much for sharing what you've learned. I will definitely pay closer attention to my hydration and sodium levels.
Hope you feel much, much better soon!0 -
Any excuse to eat salt and be a couch potato sounds good to me. Not that I can run far enough to ever get dehydrated but I often ignore thirst. I should see if the hospital will send me a pic of my bile stones, there was so many they said they'd use the picture for teaching medical students.
How are you feeling now? Are you in agony? And exploded kidney sounds excruciating.
200g of carbs might be a wee bit high for stumpy lumps such as myself but for an active man it sounds good.
I had my gall bladder out when I was 16 after a few years of pain from gall stones that they couldn't figure out because nobody thought a 16 year old would have that problem.
My surgeon said I was his youngest patient ever and would reference my more than 100 stones when teaching. Lol0 -
Loosing weight is a risk because it puts more uric acid in the urine which can also cause painful gout. The faster you loose the greater chance you could get gout. Why not kidney stones also? The last three days I have been trying to pass one. Very painful but not like an extreme case of gout. I had to have surgery on both feet and my elbow at the same time over nine years ago. Drink lots of water and loose 1-2 pounds a week. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
0 -
Wab, I feel your pain, I got one 20 years ago on a normal diet. One of the most painful things I have ever had, but I didn't have a ruptured Kidney... Ouch!
I thought just about everyone over 40 had them, and it was just a matter of time before they broke off?
It sounds like one of those things like cancer, they don't actually know what goes wrong.
And I know when I went into Bariatric Surgery seminars, they said that rapid weight loss after surgery sometimes would cause stones. They would proactively put you on a med that would prevent stones. But you haven't rapidly lost weight have you? And I can't remember which stones they were, Gall or Kidney?
Oh well, I hope you're feeling better soon,
Dan the Man from Michigan
0 -
Thanks, gang. I lost weight by basically eating at my future maintenance calorie level, so it was SLOW -- about 1 lb per week.
Some stones are uric acid, and yes, they're the same crystals associated with gout. Uric acid levels can rise on a VLC diet, but they seem to normalize over time. There's a great conversation here between Phinney and another scientist where they sort of debate the causes and effects:
http://www.meandmydiabetes.com/2011/05/30/steve-phinney-and-richard-johnson-sugar-ketones-fat-uric-acid-in-health-and-diseaseev/
Here's a chart where you can see uric acid levels rising in the first 4 weeks and then going down:
Interestingly, fructose consumption is associated with uric acid levels and incidence of both gout and kidney stones:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17928824
I haven't looked into gall stones much, but my impression is that they're due to bile crystallizing in the gall bladder. They are associated with weight loss, but might be specific to low-fat diets since it's fat in the meal that triggers the gall bladder to empty.0 -
articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/06/23/who-knew-preventing-kidney-stones-was-this-easy.aspx
This doctor can be a bit boring to watch but I find him to typically be very knowledgeable. He list potential causes and preventions of kidney stones.0 -
I've been going through the kidney stone learning process myself these past ten days, and haven't been on MFP forums that much as a result and didn't note this great thread until now. I'd passed a smaller stone last week but the ER scan showed a larger one lurking; I was in hospital today for lithotripsy (ultrasound break up of larger stones) and while hanging around waiting for xray before the procedure had to take a bio break and, well, the larger stone is history. The timing couldn't have been closer, they were just getting ready to pump me full of happy juice.
Both stones are off for analysis (they look similar). Looking forward to the result.
I'm not doing keto... I'm merely on a lower-carb macro break down (35% is my daily target) and I'm also a runner. I can drop 2kg of water during a 90-120 minute run, and often do. This is pretty common - expected even - among distance runners though. I thought I was staying on top of hydration... but maybe not.
I'm not eating particularly high levels of protein. I do consume quite a bit of yogurt; prior to starting my weight loss program last fall I hardly had any dairy products as they caused me GI distress. Since losing weight that's all changed. I'd read somewhere that low calcium (maybe a vitamin D link there too) can be a contributing factor to one type of stone development.
The pain associated with kidney stones is quite... amazing. Of course I'd heard that before but after experiencing it first hand... man, if that isn't encouragement to making whatever changes are necessary to avoid a repeat I don't know what would work.
That said the fellow sitting beside me has had 15 stones over his life time starting at age 16. Yikes!
0 -
Time for another installment of The Gent with the Stone and the Stent!
I talked with my new buddy, the urologist, yesterday. Surgery is scheduled for Oct 2, but the fun doesn't stop there. I'll get a new post-surgery stent to let my ureter recover from surgery for a week or so. And then I get a metabolic workup from their stone analyst, The Stone Lady.
I peppered the doc with questions, of course. Some interesting factoids for your amusement:
Incidence of stone-induced kidney rupture is pretty rare -- he estimated it at 1%, and my primary care doc had never seen a case.
The detection of the stone via CT scan turned out to be non-trivial. It was located about 1cm from a couple pelvic phleboliths (apparently harmless calcifications). Luckily, I had an earlier CT scan so the radiologist could compare and determine that one of those things didn't belong with the others.
I asked the doc if the CT scan could be useful in determining stone composition. His PA shook her head, but then the doc explained that opacity does correlate with composition. Uric acid stones are less opaque (around 300 HU), and calcium stones were around 900+ HU.
So we measured mine on the scan, and it was around 600 HU. Probably a mixed stone. Not very useful from a prevention standpoint, but still interesting.
I'm hoping that the follow-up with The Stone Lady will provide some additional insights. I'd REALLY like to avoid more of these in the future, and I'll happily pass along any tips.
0 -
Thanks for the update @Wabmester!
Sidenote: in your post of the pictures of the different stone types, did you see in the comments the guy who wants to buy people's stones for his collection? Potential income there, right? Lol!
I hope avoidance is as simple as increasing your fluid intake! Good luck with the surgery!0 -
Researching kidney stones has exhausted me.
My friends and family are convinced that my "crazy diet" was the cause of my stone. They may be right.
Probably the best analysis is from Paul Jaminet:
http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2010/11/dangers-of-zero-carb-diets-iv-kidney-stones/
I'm not going to summarize it, and his conclusions may be wrong. The only thing he got right for sure was this:
A 100-fold odds ratio is hardly ever seen in medicine. There must be some fundamental cause of kidney stones that is dramatically promoted by clinical ketogenic diets.
Just over half of ketogenic diet kidney stones are composed of uric acid and just under half of calcium oxalate mixed with calcium phosphate or uric acid. Among the general public, about 85% of stones are calcium oxalate mixes and about 10% are uric acid. So, roughly speaking, uric acid kidney stones are 500-fold more frequent on the ketogenic diet and calcium oxalate stones are 50-fold more frequent.
So the biggest increase in risk is for uric acid stones, probably due to the increased uric acid load and acidic urine from protein metabolism on some ketogenic diets.
In my case, my urine was alkaline, and I wasn't on a hard-core ketogenic diet. I think the content of my diet was a minor factor.
I think it was fluid levels. I ran 5 days a week. I would lose 2lbs of water via sweat during a run.
But my urine was never dark, and I drank a lot of water, so WTH?
Ready for my theory? This could be wrong, of course. We all lose water weight on a low-carb diet. Sure, part of it is due to glycogen stores being burned out, but most of it is due to sodium loss.
Why do we lose sodium? Because we have ketones in our urine, and the ketone anions get covered by sodium cations. Sodium blood concentration is TIGHTLY regulated, so our body has to dump water to maintain blood sodium concentration.
We end up with less sodium, less blood volume (water), and higher CONCENTRATIONS of other solutes in the urine.
Like I said, I could be wrong, but I think the water weight we lose is possibly a kidney stone risk.
FWIW, the sources they cite regarding those figures appear to be quite old. The first one is a paper from 2000, which referred to studies done in the 90s. This matters for the keto-for-epilepsy studies, because previous versions of the ketogenic diet were calorie and fluid restricted, thereby creating compounding reasons for the increased incidence of kidney stones that may not have been related to the macronutrient ratio.0
