How To Protect Your Kidneys And Keep Them Healthy?

Good Evening Folks!

I am Dr. Sunil Prakash, nephrology. I want to talk to my friends about how to save our kidneys. Kidney diseases are becoming incrementally explosive in India. It is possible due to bad lifestyle and bad food habits and due to pollution and our food change and water change being poisoned by excessive use of fertilizers, chemicals and pesticides. That is why more and more patients are now coming with advanced renal failure. Some important causes of kidney failure are diabetes, high blood pressure and pyelonephritis. Pyelonephritis means inflammation of the kidneys. To prevent kidney disease, I would give you the small formula which I say avoid 5 S. First S is sugar. Avoid excess sugar because excess sugar causes diabetes.

And diabetes causes 50% of kidney diseases. 2nd S is extra salt to be avoided. Increased salt intake gives rise to high blood pressure which causes again lot of kidney failure. 3rd S is smoking. Smoking is bad for heart and kidney and causes damage of both. 4th S is stress. Modern lifestyle is full of stresses, but it is our ability to cope these stresses positively which will give us benefit in our life and inability to cope with stresses causes lot of damage to our organs. 5th is sedentary lifestyle. Sedentary lifestyle means couch potato. Such people will get high sugar. They will be obese, and they eventually get diabetes. Such patient also gets lot of kidney failure. So, if you can avoid these 5 S. Plus if you can avoid some Ds. What are these Ds? Ds are drugs. Like indigenous drug, homeopathic, ayurvedic and painkillers, allopathy should be avoided.

They damage the kidney. Even now some commonly used drugs like are also being implicated which causes kidney failure. Any drug which is taken without consideration or without consultation is competent to cause kidney damage. It is called interstitial nephritis. And sometimes it leads to irreversible damage. So, avoid drugs, avoid unnecessarily IV, angiography, CT scans. They should only be done when there is enough evidence that by doing this test and diagnosis, the patient will benefit. And the benefit is more than the risk of die. 3rd D is to avoid dehydration. Especially in summers, in India, especially north India, especially elderly people wo are diabetic, if anti-blood pressure medicines, they should avoid dehydration. Sometimes the dehydration will cause fall in blood pressure and will give rise to acute kidney failure.

So, if you can avoid all these things and live the good lifestyle or top of it I would recommend, people who are above 50 years of age, who are diabetic, hypertensive or whose family has the history of diabetes, kidney failure or any other hereditary failure, they should go for a routine check-up at least once in 6 months. And the check-ups are very simple. Like doing your blood pressure, measuring your blood sugar, doing your serum creatinine and ordinary urine examination. In fact, all healthy people, middle age people should also do it. So, at this point of time, I think I want to say that the treatment of chronic kidney disease by dialysis and transplantation is very expensive. In a country where average income is 15,000/- to 20,000/- of a family for four people.

For them, dialysis and transplant are not possible. The future of kidneys diseases and management in our country lies in prevention and that is what friends, let us lead a good healthy lifestyle. Let us avoid pollution. Let us eat normal foods and lead a good active life. Another important thing is to eat little bit less and walk more. Middle-aged people at least should walk 10,000 steps every day. If we can follow these simple rules, we can be safe from dialysis and transplant.

And thank you very much for your time.