Dr. Mike Borofsky authored a favorite article on this site – Pain from Kidney Stones. Now, he has authored our first article on stone urology, meaning the urological surgeries used for treatment of stones in the kidneys and urinary tract. Ureteroscopy is fast becoming the preferred approach, outstripping shock wave lithotripsy and percutaneous lithotripsy. This is because the instruments for ureteroscopy offer superior optics and are flexible and small enough to get from the urethra up into the kidneys and into all of the crevices of the kidneys where stones form and lodge. Armed with tiny but powerful laser fibers, the new ureteroscopes permit surgeons to fracture stones in the kidneys and turn them into mostly harmless dust that passes silently for days or weeks thereafter, or into small fragments they take out during the procedure leaving not a speck behind. It is a brilliant time to be a young urologist and use these marvelous instruments to do what would otherwise require a far more complex and risky procedure (percutaneous nephrolithotomy) or depend upon an indirect and often incompletely effective one (shock wave lithotripsy).

These two articles cover the main stone types, and this new one on uric acid parallels the prior one on calcium stones. Like the calcium stone article it is meant for patients, although physicians might like some of the nuances. The purpose is not to make patients into their own physicians but to enable them to understand their own stone forming abnormalities. My ruling hypothesis is that patients want prevention, and will embrace and implement the changes needed with more enthusiasm and endurance if they fully understand the goals. LIkewise if they can themselves follow the effects of their efforts on stone risk factors they will believe that what they are doing has real meaning. I know that hypotheses are for disproving, and I know someone may well do a prospective double blind randomized trial, some day, to test mine. Right now, I believe in the idea because of Eden whose resident twosome were not just told about the tree but exactly why they should not eat of its fruit. I know it is an unfortunate comparison, given the outcome, but much effort was expended on education. My source for the details, apart from the Hebrew Bible, is Milton, J: Paradise Lost; Books V – Viii.

This site is meant to promote prevention and my current hypothesis is that enabling patients to read their own 24 hour urine tests with a professional eye will help achieve that aim. It is not an easy task. Lab reports, even the best of them, are dazzling arrays of numbers in often mysterious units. Even physicians have some work to do. But numbers are numbers and people can read them if they have the code. Here I have parsed out the main numbers for the calcium stones: Volume, calcium, oxalate, sodium, citrate and pH. Because this is the first article on reading this kind of report I also discuss collection quality, conversion of units – some labs report, as an example, calcium in mg/24 hour, others in mmol/24 hour, even mEq. So I introduce the simple conversions needed to use what I have written for a report with different units. Likewise I introduce how urine creatinine can be used to estimate collection quality. The supersaturation come at the end, as they should, being the final summary of everything. The tone is about that for trainees in nephrology or urology I have often worked with but with jargon elided and a focus on lab results per se. Those interested can follow the links into the thickets of the site which hold enough to satisfy most appetites. The main purpose is to enable patients to cast a cold eye on their own problems and on the results of treatment efforts so that in the event saturations can be effectively reduced and stone recurrence with them.

Ultimately we want to prevent kidney stones. Trial data, and my own large experience correspond in this one point: Prevention is a reasonable objective that can be successfully accomplished. Here is my own approach, simplified into five steps. They correspond to the overarching theme of this entire site: Stones require crystals; crystals follow the laws of physics; the force that drives crystallization is supersaturation; commercial vendors in the US provide supersaturation measurements in 24 hour urines at a reasonable price. So the steps are indeed simple: Know the stone crystals; measure the urine supersaturations; lower those urine supersaturations for the crystals in the stones being formed; keep them low. If stones persist, lower them more. It takes physicians to initiate this process, and there are complications such as the occasional systemic diseases which must be detected and treated in special ways. But it takes motivated patients to carry out the long term changes in fluids, diet, lifestyle needed, and to take the medications provided. It is time to focus here: Prevention is better than surgery. To help, I wrote a companion article several months ago about how to organize your medical stone prevention visits so as to get the most out of them. 

Two good trials support lower sodium diets as a way of reducing new calcium stone formation and of protecting bones from calcium loss. The physiology behind these trials is detailed in the articles on idiopathic hypercalciuria and salt. In Italy at least, and in men with calcium stones and idiopathic hypercalciuria, a diet low in sodium, moderate in protein, and high in calcium leads to less stones than low calcium diet alone, and in fact to a rather low new stone recurrence rate. Among postmenopausal women, a high calcium low sodium diet brings bone mineral balance into the positive range: Bones add mineral. Neither trial is comprehensive in covering men and women, young and old, US vs. Italian cuisine, but they are the only ones we have of this quality, they are consistent with the science we have, and convincing. To me they are enough to recommend low sodium diet, moderation of diet protein, and high diet calcium for calcium stone formers with idiopathic hypercalciuria, recommend this kind of diet without reservation pending what I hope will be more trials which cover a wider range of patients and of ages. It is this kind of additional trial we really need in the US right now, substantial, bearing on really important diet interventions, and arising out of a sound scientific base.