Sunday, December 27, 2009
Kidney stones
Kidney stones, one of the most painful of the urologic disorders, have beset humans for centuries. Scientists have found evidence of kidney stones in a 7,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. Unfortunately, kidney stones are one of the most common disorders of the urinary tract. Each year, people make almost 3 million visits to health care providers and more than half a million people go to emergency rooms for kidney stone problems.
Most kidney stones pass out of the body without any intervention by a physician. Stones that cause lasting symptoms or other complications may be treated by various techniques, most of which do not involve major surgery. Also, research advances have led to a better understanding of the many factors that promote stone formation and thus better treatments for preventing stones.
What is a kidney stone?
Kidney stone is hard stone and crystalline material formed in the kidney or in urinary tract. Kidney stone is a general cause of blood in the urine and causes pains in abdomen, flank or in groin. Kidney stones are also called as renal calculi.
Using the ultrasound scanning, most of the renal stones that is kidney stones can be diagnosed easily without any symptoms. Now day's renal stone is major health problem. Creation of the stones in the urinary tract is called as urolithiasis and in kidney is known as nephrolithiasis. It hits at any time without any warning and worse pains occurs than the labour pain.
Occurrence of renal stones in men is more than women. The ratio of male-to-female is 3:1. It mostly occurs in 30-50 years of the age.
Kidney Stone Symptoms:
When the tubular structure is getting blocked, pains are generated in waves and body tries to unblock the barrier. These pain waves are called as colic.
Renal colic which is related to the kidney has a typical appearance when the kidney stone is passed.
The pain is powerful and comes on rapidly.
It is usually placed in the side or the flank of the mid back and emits to the groin. Those who gets affected can not find suitable position and many twist in the pain.
This is opposite to the non colicky type of pain, like pancreatitis or appendicitis, in which pains are increased after the movement and affected person hold very silent.
Sweating, vomiting and nausea are very common.
Blood found in the urine because ureter forced the stones. Occurrence of blood in urine does not for all the time means that person suffering from kidney stone. For the blood there are some other reasons such as trauma, bladder infection or the tumors. Microscope and urinalysis identified the blood in urine even if it is not shown by necked eyes.
Treatment for kidney stones:
Most of the kidney stones ultimately pass to the urinary tract by their own within the two days (48 hours), by taking lot of fluid intake. Medications for the pain relief are prescribed for the kidney stone symptoms. There are various factors responsible for passing the stone. These contain previous stone passage, the size of the person, prostate enlargement, size of the stone and the pregnancy. A stone is of size 4 mm has 80 percent chances of passage and a 5 mm stone has chances of 20 percent. The stones having the 9mm to 10m are rarely passed on their own. Mostly they have to need treatment for removing.
For increasing the passage rates of kidney stones, some medications are very useful. These medications include calcium channel blockers like nifedipine and alpha blockers like tamulosin. These are the drugs given to those people whose kidney stones do not quickly pass throughout the urinary tract.
The procedure named as lithotripsy is used fro the kidney stones that do not pass their own. Shock waves are used in this procedure which breaks down large stones in to small pieces which can then pass through urinary system.
For removing the kidney stones, surgical techniques may also used. This can be done by doing small cut in the skin or using an instrument known as ureteroscope which passed from urethra and bladder into the ureter.
Kidney Stone Surgery
Kidney stone can be removed by surgery in rare cases, as most of the cases are treated by pill prescription. Majority of kidney stones are within 5 mm size and can be dissolved through dedicated diet and other therapies, but the kidney stones larger than 5mm need to be removed by a major surgical operation. Generally, kidney stones that are bigger than 10mm size cannot be dissolved into the kidney. Researchers believe that these larger size kidney stones can remain in the kidney unnoticed for long time and can cause some serious damage to the body.