Aims and objectives
Kidney stone disease is a common benign condition with an estimated prevalence of about 9%.
An established body of literature has shown that kidney stone disease is associated with systemic conditions such as:
-diabetes;
-metabolic syndrome;
-high blood pressure;
-chronic kidney disease;
-cardiovascular outcomes.
In particular,
stone formers,
compared with non-stone formers,
have increased:
-pulse-wave velocity;
-arterial stiffness;
-vascular calcifications;
The pathophysiology and the main driving forces for formation of kidney stones of different composition may vary considerably; similarly,
it can be hypothesized that certain...
Methods and materials
We performed a cross-sectional study with 180 patients underwent at least one stone composition analysis from January 01 2015 to May 30 2018.
The original dataset was linked with the imaging database to identify those patients with at least one abdominal CT scan examination during the period of interest.
For each patient we considered:
-age;
-gender;
-comorbidities (diabetes and high blood pressure);
-laboratory values (serum creatinine,
spot urine pH,
24-h urine chemistries);
-estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR),
calculated using the CDK-EPI creatinine equation;
-stone composition...
Results
There were 108 (60.0%) patients with AAC; those patients were older,
had a significantly higher prevalence of diabetes,
high blood pressure,
lower eGFR and a tendency towards a higher prevalence of male gender.
In univariate analyses,
calcium phosphate content was significantly directly associated with eGFR (rho 0.34,
p < 0.001) and inversely with age (rho −0.27,
p < 0.001),
and was higher among females (17.8 ± 29.2% vs 8.6 ± 20.3%,
p = 0.011); conversely,
uric acid content was associated directly with age (rho 0.16,...
Conclusion
The main finding of our study was that AAC was associated with the stone composition; in particular,
we found:
-a significant direct association with the amount of calcium phosphate: the odds of AAC increased by about 25% for each 10% shift in stone composition from calcium oxalate to calcium phosphate.
Interestingly,
vascular calcifications are also made of calcium phosphate,
suggesting the presence of a common pathway which could involve abnormalities in the physiological biomineralization process.
-a high prevalence of AAC in an unselected sample of...
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