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How to Prevent Kidney Failure? 4 Helpful Tips!

Well, there’s a saying that your body is a temple. So, you need to take immense care of it to make it last good and long. And as you must know, your kidneys play a great part in this domain.

How to Prevent Kidney Failure?

Kidneys have a lot to do as these filter waste matter and excess fluid and cleanse your blood.

But when kidneys cannot perform such a function, it means you’ve got some kidney disease which ultimately leads to kidney failure. So, read on to learn some of the best tips for how to prevent kidney failure.1

But to lead a relaxed life, you need to get rid of all issues that bother your kidney ranging from diabetes and high blood pressure to other chronic kidney diseases.

So, without further delay, let us dive into 4 tips to maintain kidney health and prevent kidney failure.

1. Get Your Blood Sugar on Track

Obviously, it is easier to prevent kidney failure rather than deal with consequences, so be vigilant. Increased blood sugar means doom for your kidneys. Why? This leads to unwanted diabetes. So, manage diabetes by knowing chronic kidney disease basics!

Suppose your liver releases a good amount of glucose, but your body produces little of the hormone insulin or cannot use it properly. In that case, your blood suffers from elevated blood sugar levels.

This is unhealthy for your kidneys. As per kidney.org, if your blood sugar2 is more than 180 mg/dl, the kidneys begin to load sugar into your urine.

So, untreated diabetes due to high blood sugar damages the kidney’s blood vessels. Due to this, your kidney fails to filter waste properly.

How to prevent kidney failure
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1.1. How to Check Your Blood Sugar?

If you want to prevent kidney failure, keep your sugar levels in check. Now that we know about the ill effects of blood sugar on kidneys, it becomes our responsibility to treat it for good. Let us check out a few ways to get your blood sugar in the target range!

1.1.1. Get Yourself Motivated for Exercise

First of all, get your body moving! Regular exercise helps in healthy weight gain. Reports show that higher exercise boosts insulin sensitivity.

And greater insulin sensitivity means your blood cells can effectively utilize the present sugar in your blood. You may use a glucometer to check your blood sugar before and after exercise to spot the difference.

1.1.2. Soak in Some Fibre

Soluble fibre greatly helps to manage blood sugar levels. This helps slow down the process of carb digestion and absorption of sugar in your blood. Hence, assisting in a maintained rise in sugar levels in the bloodstream.

Ultimately, this helps you out with type 1 diabetes. Trusted sources state that the daily fibre consumption for women is 25 grams and 35 grams for males.

So, try out a salad of salted veggies, fruits, and whole grains to get a fibre-rich result!

1.1.3. Keep Hydrated

Last but not least, keeping your body hydrated is the key to prevent kidney failure!

Yes, a lot of water prevents dehydration. Along with this, drinking water plenty helps you to get rid of all the sugar and toxins in your kidneys. Always remember that water rehydrates your blood.

A study by the National Library of Medicine states that people who drink more water have a low chance of developing kidney disease.

2. Blood Pressure Control

Stop hypertension 3or high blood pressure is yet another problem that affects your kidneys adversely and will be a hindrance to prevent kidney failure. You need to know more about this issue to prevent kidney disease that makes your life miserable.

There are nephrons in each of your kidneys, these are supplied with an intricate network of blood vessels. Blood flows through these arteries in great volumes, but these arteries narrow down and harden if you suffer from high blood pressure.

Such damaged arteries are unable to supply filtered blood to the kidneys. Required oxygen does not reach the nephrons if your arteries are not in good shape and your kidneys suffer the consequences.

So, keep your blood pressure in control if you want your kidneys healthy and want to prevent kidney failure. Several websites provide you with several ways to manage your blood pressure, but here are some selected and crisp recommendations to do the same!

So, stay connected to achieve lower blood pressure!

The Relationship Between Blood Pressure and Kidneys

2.1.How to Get Your Blood Pressure Right? Follow These Tips!

Medications are required for blood pressure control, but lifestyle changes also play a significant role in this area. So, giving it a try is worth your time!

2.1.1. Lose Weight

Losing some pounds may help you with a healthy weight and consequently modest blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Usually, blood pressure accelerates as your weight gets high.

As reports state, blood pressure decreases by nearly 1 millimetre of mercury with every lost kilogram of weight. So, keeping track of this reduces half of your worries!

Trouble sleeping is one of the main causes of an unhealthy weight. So, take the required steps to improve your sleeping habit. Talk to your doctor and get the best out of the treatment options in this case.

Get the size of your waistline at check. Why? If you carry loads of weight around that area, there’s a high-risk factor of increasing blood pressure and cholesterol levels! So, keep yourself physically active to reduce stress on your kidneys!

2.1.2. Divorce Yourself From a Junk Diet!

Consuming a healthy diet is always the mantra for a good lifestyle. So, why ignore it?

Firstly, skip canned foods. Fat-free diets of fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and foods low in saturated fats and trans fats lower high blood pressure by nearly 11 mm Hg.

The DASH diet is one of the ways you can achieve the needed result! Studies highlight that this sort of diet has minimum sodium in it when compared to the typical American diet. It is the best recommendation for it focuses on low-fat dairy products and a lower protein diet.

The DASH diet4 focuses on food that is phosphorus high as dairy, animal protein, or dark-colored sodas. High levels of this mineral pull calcium from bones and make them weak.

This issue may also cause itchy skin. So, if you are suffering from these symptoms, get yourself treated in the early stages to avoid higher risk factors.

It limits sodium to approximately 2 of 300 mg per day, this healthy diet lowers the LDL cholesterol range in your bloodstream and high blood pressure. These two are also significant risk factors for heart disease.

3. Try Alcohol Detox

Limiting your alcohol intake can help a lot more than you may think!

Alcohol intake in small amounts or excess proves to be harmful. So, get rid of the habit in totality. Stuff like chronic kidney disease, autoimmune diseases, and alcohol intake are intricately related.

Studies conducted by Medical Science Monitor show that the kidneys filter nearly 10 % of ingested ethanol in its raw form. So, consuming too much alcohol overloads the kidney with the excess job, which is not good.

How to prevent kidney failure
Photo by RitaE from Pixabay Copyright 2019

3.1. Help Your Kidney Out With Lifestyle Changes

If you want a healthy kidney record, try to help yourself with alcohol detox. This proves to be the best phase of your diet as alcohol is entirely flushed out of your system.

You can try alcohol detox even at home. Blend a few fruits like berries, melon, and citrus, and get your smoothie ready. This acts as a substitute for the sweet craving you got for alcohol.

So, why wait? Get your health conditions improving!

The glomerular filtration rate is a blood test that reports the working of your kidneys. Ask your doctor to get a Contrast dye X-ray. This’ll provide you with the intricate happenings in your kidney.

Provide a few minutes for your kidneys and detect your kidney health through a simple quiz! If you face problems despite following the required steps, ask your doctor for better results!

4. Bid Adieu to Your Cigar!

Smoking is injurious to health, but it is more injurious to kidneys. Smoking leads to acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease. Why? Because smoking has a damaging effect on every organ of your system.

So, it’s unsurprising that a cigar can cost you your kidneys. It’s the keystone in developing kidney disease. Kidney function is hampered due to digestive and kidney diseases. Hence, quit smoking! It’s the only way out.

Continual smoking restricts blood flow in your kidneys. Reports also show that smoking increases the risk factor for proteinuria5, which is the presence of excess protein in your urine.

One of the main functions of kidneys is not to let great quantities of serum proteins flush out through urine. This may also lead to Berger’s disease or IgA nephropathy.

If your kidney fails to do so, proteinuria is a victim. This chronic kidney failure affects the nutrition level of your entire body!

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Photo by Myriams Fotos on Pixabay Copyright 2017

4.1. Get Your Kidneys Healthy With Some No-smoke Tips

As you know about the ill effects of smoking on your kidneys, referring to a few healthy tips may help you with the issue! So, why think? Get going.

4.1.1. Try Out Nicotine Patches or Lozenges

To avoid kidney damage and chronic kidney disease (CKD6), try a nicotine replacement remedy. This therapy might help you overcome the unbearable craving for tobacco and cigarettes. Now, isn’t that cool?

But firstly, get your kidneys checked with the help of imaging tests like X-rays. Early detection frees you from the increased risk factors of kidney damage.

4.1.2. Get Your Physical Activity Going!

Nothing’s better than getting your body in active mode. Short bursts of exercise, like a few push-ups or just running up and down your stairs, can help you eliminate unnecessary cigar cravings.

As the saying goes that an empty mind is the workshop of the devil. Keep your mind occupied with this productive stuff to reap the utmost benefits!

4.1.3. Prefer Reinforcements!

Get in touch with a support group or with a family member. Chatting on the phone or getting a few counselling sessions can work miracles. These will provide you with a shoulder to fall back on and share your troubles!

Here’s a telephone quitline for smoking you may wish to refer to. So, go ahead and lead a carefree and healthy life!

5. A Close-Up: Prevent Kidney Failure

Now that you know about many ways to prevent kidney failure, it’ll not be difficult to try out all of these and find out the best for yourself!

A consultation with your doctor and the willpower to improve your kidney health will lead you to a better life.

All the recommendations are good, but, one needs to remember that people with a kidney transplant need to continue with anti-rejection medications. In addition to this, maintaining good hygiene is super important. So, do not waste a minute, and get the tips executed!

  1. Rosner, Mitchell H., et al. “Classification of uremic toxins and their role in kidney failure.” Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology 16.12 (2021): 1918-1928. ↩︎
  2. Aly, Arafa H., et al. “Theoretical study of hybrid multifunctional one-dimensional photonic crystal as a flexible blood sugar sensor.” Physica Scripta 95.3 (2020): 035510. ↩︎
  3. Mills, Katherine T., Andrei Stefanescu, and Jiang He. “The global epidemiology of hypertension.” Nature Reviews Nephrology 16.4 (2020): 223-237. ↩︎
  4. Filippou, Christina D., et al. “Dietary approaches to stop hypertension (DASH) diet and blood pressure reduction in adults with and without hypertension: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” Advances in Nutrition 11.5 (2020): 1150-1160. ↩︎
  5. Bartal, Michal Fishel, Marshall D. Lindheimer, and Baha M. Sibai. “Proteinuria during pregnancy: definition, pathophysiology, methodology, and clinical significance.” American journal of obstetrics and gynecology 226.2 (2022): S819-S834. ↩︎
  6. Sun, Dan-Qin, et al. “MAFLD and risk of CKD.” Metabolism 115 (2021): 154433. ↩︎

Last Updated on by Sathi Chakraborty, MSc Biology

Author

Sunanda Basu

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