Researchers also report growing number of cases among women and children
FRIDAY, Jan. 15, 2016 (HealthDay News) — A growing number of teens, women, and blacks are being diagnosed with nephrolithiasis, according to findings published online Jan. 14 in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
The researchers analyzed data from South Carolina from 1997 to 2012, and found that the annual incidence of nephrolithiasis among children and adults rose 16 percent during that time. The largest increases were among teens (4.7 percent a year), females (3 percent a year), and blacks (2.9 percent a year). During the study period, the risk of nephrolithiasis doubled among children, and there was a 45 percent increase in the lifetime risk for women.
Teen girls had the highest rate of increase in nephrolithiasis, and they were more common among females aged 10 to 24 than among males in the same age group. After age 25, nephrolithiasis was more common in men, the study authors said. Nephrolithiasis incidence rose 15 percent more in blacks than in whites during each five-year period of the study.
“The emergence of kidney stones in children is particularly worrisome, because there is limited evidence on how to best treat children for this condition,” said study leader Gregory Tasian, M.D., a pediatric urologist and epidemiologist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The fact that stones were once rare and are now increasingly common could contribute to the inappropriate use of diagnostic tests such as computed tomography scans for children with kidney stones, since health care providers historically have not been accustomed to evaluating and treating children with kidney stones,” he explained in a hospital news release.
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