A futurist report on public health I wrote about last week had a lot of references to the likely impact of climate change, particularly hurricanes and droughts. But a new study suggests another reason why climate change, particularly global warming, should be a public health concern: kidney stones.
Higher temps increase dehydration and that concentrates minerals like calcium in the blood, and that creates an environment where kidney stones are more likely to form.
A study published in Environmental Health Perspectives analyzed 60,443 patients over a 20-day period from 2005 to 2011 in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. It found that as mean daily temperatures increased above 50, more people were diagnosed with kidney stones. Los Angeles was the anomaly. On the flip side, frigid temperatures in Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta led to people staying indoors, and also played a role in kidney stone development, perhaps because of limited food options.
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But the study wasn’t totally conclusive. The lead author of the study, Dr. Gregory Tasian, a pediatric urologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Journal of the American Medical Association that having a predisposition to kidney stones was an important factor.
“Although 11 percent of the U.S. population has had kidney stones, most people have not…It is likely that higher temperatures increase the risk of kidney stones in those people predisposed to stone formation.”
The painful condition frequently requires surgery. A worrying development is that more children are developing stones because of inadequate access to water.