Hypertension and Kidney Disease

 

While many might think that there is no relation what so ever between hypertension and kidney disease, they couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, once you analyze the idea, the presence of a close relationship between diseases affecting the cardiovascular system and the renal (kidney) system is completely logical.

First of all, the dynamics of this relationship must be understood. In cases of primary or essential hypertension, the kidney is damaged as a result of the elevated blood pressure. However, in cases of primary renal disease (e.g. congenital polycystic kidney), hypertension may occur as a complication. In this case we call it, secondary hypertension.

Primary hypertension is vague when it comes to both causes and symptoms. Its exact cause is still undefined. It’s considered to be a result of a messy combination between genetic predisposition (it tends to run in families) and lifestyle habits (too much cholesterol, too many cigarettes and too many pounds on the scale).

Its symptoms are difficult to notice because they’re not specific. Sometimes, there aren’t any symptoms at all. This is why they call primary hypertension, the “silent killer”.

However, after years of the disease, symptoms resulting from its complications begin to manifest themselves. The renal system is one of the most important systems affected.

First of all, you have to know the kidneys’ function to understand the severity of the condition. The kidneys’ main function is too clean out your body by helping to take out the garbage. This garbage includes waste products produced by vital metabolic processes taking place in every cell of your body, byproducts from drugs, toxins, etc.

That’s why you can imagine if this function is impaired, the amount of toxins accumulating in the body and the harm they’d result in. What brings hypertension into any of this is the question you might be asking. Well, the kidneys need blood supply flowing through them properly to carry out their functions. If their blood supply is impaired, they will end up throwing out important things and keeping the wrong things in.

Long years of hypertension will cause impairment of the kidneys’ blood supply by affection of both the heart and the blood vessel. The heart has to keep pumping blood to every part of the body despite the increasing blood pressure. This causes its muscles to enlarge gradually but eventually they became tired and a hypertensive patient ends up with a big heart that’s just too tired to do its job any more. This is heart failure and it means that despite all compensatory mechanisms possible, the heart can no longer pump blood to every place in the body, including the kidneys.

Hypertension also causes damage of the walls of blood vessels supplying the kidney in long standing cases. Factors associated with and/or causing hypertension, such as hyperlipidemia (increase in the circulating fats) and conditions which increase viscosity of the blood, such as polycythemia (increase in the number of red blood cells) when combined with damaged blood vessel walls increase the risk of thrombi or large blood clots including the blood vessels supplying the kidneys and therefore depriving them of necessary oxygen.

Hypertension is considered the second most common cause of end stage renal disease in the world and this is the clearest indication of the relationship between