Some Interesting Facts About Kidney Stones

Did you know that there are more than 1 million cases of kidney stones each year in the United States.  That’s 83,333 stones per month, 19,230 per week, 2,739 per day, 144 per hour and one stone each and every minute of each and every day.

Approximately 1 in 272 Americans will have a kidney stone each year. The risk of forming a kidney stone is 10% over the lifetime of each adult. Males tend to form stones more frequently than females, with 6.3% of males aged 20-74 reporting a stone each year. Each year, 4.1% of females in the same age range report having suffered with a kidney stone.

The group most at-risk for forming kidney stones is white males. Both white males and females are more prone to kidney stone formation than African-American men and women. While kidney stones occur with much greater frequency in males, the number of women who develop kidney stones has been increasing in recent years. The reason often given is that since Title IX was enacted in the 1970’s, women have been participating in sporting activities in ever-increasing numbers. Playing sports increases the risk of dehydration, which can lead to kidney stone formation. Kidney stone sufferers have long known that proper hydration is critically important to lowering stone risk.

Most people experience their first kidney stone between the ages of 20 and 40, and once a person develops that first stone, he or she is much more prone to develop additional stones in the future.

The largest kidney stone that most surgeons ever get to see is around the size of a golf ball. Most stones, however, much smaller, with the average stone approximately 2-4 millimeters in size. Imagine the shock of Sandor Sarkadi when it was discovered that he was carrying around a kidney stone weighing in at a staggering 2.48 pounds. The stone, which was approximately the size of a coconut was surgically removed by Mr. Sarkadi’s doctor. Mr. Sarkadi, a native Hungarian, is now the proud owner of the Guiness Book of World Records record for the largest kidney stone ever recorded. As one who has experienced multiple stones of average size, and having experienced the excruciating pain associated with these small stones, I can only imagine Mr. Sarkadi’s suffering.

Until next time…cheers!

Watch Out for "Instant" Kidney Stone Cures

There are a number of “Instant Cures” for kidney stones making the rounds on the Internet these days. I have reviewed a number of them. Most of them claim to reduce your stones to “slush” so that the stone or stones can be painlessly passed through the urinary tract. Do not be fooled. The problems with these so-called remedies should be immediately obvious to the stone sufferer. First, if these preparations worked, then why has modern medicine failed to adopt them? Contrary to popular belief, neither your physician nor the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have a vested interest in continuing to see you suffer. If these preparations worked, they would already be in the process of clinical trial. The hawkers of these remedies often mention that these preparations are not drugs, but rather natural substances not regulated by the FDA. If that were the case, your urologist would be all over these “cures”.

The most obvious tell, however, is the fact that these supposed cures are not cures at all, but rather solutions after a stone has already formed. Even if they worked, you would still have to experience the agony of that stone until the healing relief of the potion kicked in. Given that we know that stones are formed from minerals and are literally small rocks, common sense should prevail over the claim that some natural potion will dissolve these small rocks into slush. Further, these so-called cures do not address the most important issue, which is how can we prevent stones from forming in the first place. Why would you be satisfied only with resolving a very real problem that you already have? We should all be much more interested in doing whatever is necessary to ensure that the problem does not occur.

Until next time...cheers!