Who gets kidney stones?

Kidney stones — nobody likes an uninvited guest.

Living in warm, wet climes may increase your risk of harboring kidney stones, according to a new study. The findings explain the intriguing "stone belt" phenomenon.

Kidney stones are solid clumps of material that develop in the kidney. They consist of crystal-forming substances, such as calcium, oxalate, and uric acid.

An estimated 12 percent of the population of the United States will experience one or more of these uninvited guests at some point in their lives.
Small stones can exit the body during urination with little or no fanfare. Larger stones, however, are a different story; although rarely fatal, they can be excruciating.
To give you some idea, the following comes from a first-hand account. "It was what I can imagine a knife stuck in my back being twisted all around would feel like." According to another, "A female nurse told me it's the worst pain a man can ever feel because a man can't go through labor."
Aside from the agony, kidney stones don't come cheap, either. In 2000, around $2.1 billion was spent treating them in U.S. hospitals. This figure marked a 50 percent increase since 1994.
Due to the cost, the steady increase of prevalence, and the intense pain, there is significant interest in understanding why these ghastly miniature boulders are formed.

Who gets kidney stones?

Certain risk factors are well-established. For instance, if you are male or have diabetes, you are more likely to develop them. Another factor that raises your chance of growing your very own kidney stone is your ZIP code.

Their analysis uncovered a distinct geographic pattern of kidney stones. As they rolled further south and east, prevalence increased. Men in North Carolina, for example, had an almost three times greater risk of developing kidney stones than men in North Dakota.
At first glance, this map-based lottery seems strange and perhaps a little unfair. However, it makes more sense when the weather is taken into account.
People living in hotter climes are likely to sweat more, so it follows that they are also more likely to be dehydrated. And, being chronically dehydrated is a well-established risk factor for kidney stones.

But according to the authors of the latest study, temperature cannot be the only vagabond on the rocky road to internal stones. As they explain:

Higher temperature does not fully account for the stone belt phenomenon. If temperature alone was the primary environmental driving factor, the American Southwest should have a similar stone prevalence to the Southeast."

...And it doesn't, so researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine in California set out to investigate another climate-based factor: precipitation. The results were recently published in the Journal of Endourology.
To test their theory, the researchers concentrated on the good folk of California, which is a state with a particularly varied climate. They dived into data from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development databases.
They perused the facts and figures of 63,994 people who underwent kidney stone procedures in the state in 2010–2012. They also gathered climate information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.