Why Swelling Occur in Patients with Renal Failure

In most cases, swelling is caused by excess fluid accumulating in your body. It can be widespread or localized. The root cause is that your kidneys don’t work well or completely lose their function. Swelling in legs, ankles, face, feet or hands are the most common areas.

There are two major reasons causing swelling--heavy loss of protein in your urine and damaged renal function.

Heavy loss of protein in your urine: loss of protein over 3.0 grams per day.

When Renal Failure occurs, your kidney function becomes abnormal. With the aid of protein, blood volume can be maintained. When Renal Failure happens, the fluid in your blood vessel reduced, under such condition, the kidneys would signal that there is short of blood volume which would result in the fluid get into interstitial spaces. Consequently, swelling appears.

The key point to treat swelling is to reduce the loss of protein. In addition, low salt diet should be recommended for patients with Renal Failure.

Damaged renal function

Kidneys are unable to excrete sodium into your urine and cause swelling. Swelling in this situation can be triggered by taking excessive sodium from your daily diets. Patients with Renal Failure may require dialysis in the serious cases. Because the kidneys is unable to regulate electrolytes balance, that’s why we adopt dialysis. Dialysis is an artificial kidney; it can function as your kidneys when the real fail to work. Patients with Renal Failure whose renal function declines to less than 5%-10% require dialysis.

Patients with Renal Failure should limit the water intake, because excess water will aggravate the severity of your swelling. In addition, the kidney function has already been impaired, excessive water imposes heavy burden to your kidneys, making the condition much more serious whereas.
When Renal Failure occurs, there are so many things need to pay attention. To keep away from various complications, healthy lifestyle should be maintained. Only in this way won’t the condition get worsen.