How Alcohol Affects Your Kidney Health

The pain can come in ever-increasing waves until either the blockage is cleared or the intestine bursts. The treatment of pancreatitis varies based on the underlying cause. When inflamed, the appendix swells and becomes filled with a thick, infectious fluid called pus. Indigestion is often treated with over-the-counter antacids like Mylanta (aluminum hydroxide) or H2 blockers like Pepcid AC (famotidine).

Kidney infection

Also, alcohol does not appear to make kidney disease worse or make it more likely that someone with kidney disease will need dialysis. For kidney pain, you may start with a visit to your primary care doctor or a nephrologist—a doctor who diagnoses and treats kidney diseases. More than 30% of people who are hospitalized with COVID-19 have kidney damage.

Kidney Pain After Drinking Alcohol: Symptoms

These can not only slow the damage of kidney disease, but make you feel better as well. When the damage has progressed to the point that 85 to 90 percent of your kidney function is gone, and they no longer work well enough to keep you alive, it’s called end-stage kidney failure. There’s dialysis, which uses a machine to filter the toxins and remove water from your body as your kidneys are no longer able to do this. Where possible, the preferred therapy is a kidney transplant. While an organ transplant can sound daunting, it’s actually often the better alternative, and the closest thing to a cure, if you qualify for a kidney transplant. Drinking alcohol heavily can have several long-term health consequences including type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

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Acute kidney injury usually goes away in time, but in some cases, it can lead to lasting kidney damage. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that most American adults (two out of three) drink alcohol. Too often, some of these regular drinkers have more than five drinks at one time. In fact, about a quarter of drinkers reported they had done this on at least one day in the past year. “Binge” drinking has harmful effects on the kidney that can even lead to acute kidney failure. A sudden drop in kidney function is called acute kidney failure.

• Their analysis included 20 studies representing a total of 292,431 patients.
• Regular, heavy alcohol use can also be harmful to your kidneys over time.
• Kidney pain can occur on one or both sides of the back just below the rib cage.
• Alcohol is known to increase your risk for several different types of cancer and cause kidney damage over time.
• To address the pain, first consider if your diet may have led to constipation, indigestion, or a food-borne illness.
• Your doctor may prescribe proton pump inhibitors or H2 antagonists to reduce the production of stomach acid.

Alcohol is a toxic substance that can cause dependence alongside a range of other negative health effects.

However, during chronic ethanol consumption, the body also uses CYP2E1 in the liver as well as the kidneys. Interestingly, studies find that CYP2E1 induction is much more robust in the kidneys compared with the liver (Roberts et al. 1994; Zerilli et al. 1995). This massive induction of CYP2E1 in the kidneys results in oxidative stress that modifies phospholipids in cell membranes. Such modified phospholipids may in turn activate immune cells called neutrophil granulocytes, which further aggravates oxidative stress, promoting a vicious cycle (Latchoumycandane et al. 2015). Dehydration due to drinking alcohol may lead to the formation of kidney stones.

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• But, even controlling the cause might not keep kidney damage from progressing.
• Pain from the kidneys tends to be dull; you might sense that it stems from deep within your body.
• Because the kidneys are involved in the regulation of blood pressure, people with PKD often have hypertension (high blood pressure).
• In severe cases, you may need to visit a doctor for an IV fluid.

It also might be due to an anatomical issue, like a ureteropelvic junction obstruction. Both conditions would need to be evaluated and treated by your doctor. Binge drinking, defined as having four or more drinks at a time, may result in a serious condition known as acute kidney injury.

Liver disease and kidney disease are conditions that can be caused by long-term alcohol abuse, sometimes as part of end-stage alcoholism and death. While it’s not a concern after one night of binge drinking, if you habitually over-imbibe, the damages does alcohol affect your kidneys can accumulate in the liver and cause fatty liver disease or scarring that leads to cirrhosis. Once the liver becomes compromised, the blood flow to the kidneys is interrupted, instigating a domino effect of vital organ damage and possible shutdown.

This condition requires immediate medical attention, and treatment may involve antibiotics if the blockage is caused by a kidney infection instead of kidney stones. Hydronephrosis is a condition characterized by one (or two) swollen kidneys, filled with urine due to an obstruction or blockage of the urinary tract. This could be caused by kidney stones, and may present with flank pain or an inability to urinate. When worrying about how alcohol affects the kidneys, many wonder, “Can alcohol cause kidney stones?” Dehydration can, and excessive alcohol consumption quickly induces dehydration. Because alcohol is a diuretic, it can cause severe dehydration when over-consumed, and in fact dehydration is one of the biggest culprits in causing the symptoms of a hangover (like headache). This is why many a hangover recovery involves drinking a sports drink full of electrolytes or (more problematically) a hair-of-the-dog cure in the form of a spicy Bloody Mary.