THE KIDNEY STONE DIET
If we put together everything on this site about diet for kidney stone prevention we get a reasonable and consistent image of one basic pattern. It is more or less what is ideal for idiopathic hypercalciuria and for reducing urine oxalate. It is the diet that has been...
Case 3: A Success Story
This is a first for the site, and perhaps it should have been a feature long ago. After all the generalizations and reviews there is something wonderful about a single instance that contains all the elements of a topic in the kind of instructive detail we can get only in life itself. Pat – who has permitted me to use his name and data – forms calcium stones and has idiopathic hypercalciuria and a job that makes hydration a problem. For treatment I wanted to use low sodium diet to lower his urine calcium excretion and if possible avoid thiazide diuretics just because of his job which is outside and in summertime poses serious heat loads. MIchelle, his wife, created a reliable low sodium diet for him as proven by multiple follow up tests and that reduction of sodium lowered urine sodium and stone risk, as one might expect. I asked her to share her experience in doing this, and she responded with this wonderful article. It helps that she is a professional writer! I am indebted to Michelle and Pat for their story, and I hope you like it.
TREATMENT OF IDIOPATHIC CALCIUM STONES
Here are all the trials for prevention of idiopathic calcium stones, and my personal approach to using their results in clinical stone prevention. The whole site thus far has been built to support this article, which is the capstone of the enterprise. To highlight its importance I have made it header type larger.
Beside the usual references, I provide spreadsheets that contain all of the trial stone data with links to the original articles and PDF images of the articles. I also provide spreadsheets of stone risk data from the trials that I use in my analysis of the physiological responses to treatment. So this is a definitive as I can make it. I have left the two preceding videos in red because they are the steps up to this article, and perhaps people might want to view them in preparation. The two prior articles on phenotypes that come before the videos are also preparatory to this final presentation.
I say final because with the full presentation of all of the trials we have more or less covered the entirety of idiopathic calcium stone disease and need to move on to other stone types and to the systemic diseases that cause stones.
CALCIUM PHOSPHATE STONES: Causes and Prevention
The second in this series of stone forming phenotypes, the calcium phosphate stone formers are less numerous than the calcium oxalate stone formers, but perhaps more worrisome, and certainly more complex. There are two types, those whose stones contain any brushite – an unusual form of calcium phosphate in stones, and those whose phosphate is only hydroxyapatite – the mineral found in bones. This latter group is to a large extent composed of young women, for reasons we do not know. Phosphate stones are likely than the calcium oxalate variety to be numerous, and often produce nephrocalcinosis, a mixture of small stones and tissue calcium deposits. Nephrocalcinosis, in turn, is often labelled medullary sponge kidney simply on radiological grounds, even when the distinctive lesions of MSK are not necessarily present. Likewise, phosphate stone patients can appear to have renal tubular acidosis because of nephrocalcinosis and because RTA and phosphate stone patients both produce a more alkaline urine than do normals, or patients with calcium oxalate stones. All in all, this is a complex form of calcium stones, challenging for clinicians and often very trying and concerning for patients with it. The article is long and difficult, so you might want to watch this video by way of an introduction.