What Should I Do If I Experience a High Level of Potassium

High levels of potassium, also called hyperkalemia. It usually appears as one suffers from Acute Renal Failure or happens in people on dialysis. Hyperkalemia refers to the kalemia level higher than 6mmol/L, it can cause arrhythmia or even death.

Why would that happen?

Potassium is usually excreted by kidneys. They struggle to process fluids, electrolytes and wastes even in their best days, let alone those who have already suffered from Renal Failure and their kidney function has been impaired greatly.

Some of the potassium comes from our daily diet. Normally speaking, healthy kidneys excrete more kalium as you take foods high in the mineral; if you eat less, then excrete less. One thing you need to remember is that even you don’t take any foods containing kalium, your kidneys still excrete the kalium.

Patients with Renal Failure can’t remove the mineral from the blood anymore because of their impaired kidney function, which explains why the kalemia soars.

What are the common symptoms of kalemia?

Weakness of limbs, numb tongues, arrhythmia or even cardiac arrest as a result of high levels of potassium. Whatever those with dialysis or develop Renal Failure, limiting the potassium intake is always a wise choice.

How to avoid from what we eat?

You can stay away from foods high in potassium, such as chocolate, cocoa, coffee, tea, sport beverage, bananas, loquat, oranges, carambola, tomato, potato, mushroom, agaric, carrot, cabbage, spinach, kelp, sodium salt and so on and so forth.

Learn to read labels on the packages, it is right there. This is also one way to avoid food high in kalium.

Top 5 Foods Recommended for Patients with Renal Failure

Prevention Renal Failure is way much better than treatment, you may say of course I know that, but how much do you know the importance and really carry out in your daily life? Or if the patient is a kid who is unwillingly to eat those foods, then what should you do about that?

Anyway, first things first, you should admit the fact that by eating right food, it could help you prevent from the harassment from Renal Failure, or, the diet means a lot to your illness condition if you have already got the disease.

Here are top five foods which are good for your kidney health.

No. 1—onion

Onion is a kidney-friendly food attributing to its quercetin. The chemicals in onion are able to prevent the fatty material from depositing in one’s blood vessels, protect one’s heart and anti-inflammation. If you or your cared one is a Renal Failure patient, don't forget to try onion.







No.2—apple

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”, the old saying still works today. Apples is characterized as anti-inflammation and reduce cholesterol etc. apples can be eaten raw or cooked, or if your kid doesn’t like eating apple, then give him or her apple juice.








No.3—berries

Berries are known as kidney-friendly food for a really long time. Those berries include blueberry, strawberry, blackberry, cranberry, and raspberry and so on and so forth. Various berries obtain different features, but all in all, those fruits are good for the bone, heart, or anti-inflammation etc.




No. 4—egg white

Please notice that it is white egg instead of egg yolk. When I was little, I hated eating eggs, both egg white and yolk, because I was always choked by it. I assume same thing may happen in kids now. One thing you may not know is that egg white is pure protein, can you believe that? It provides us the highest quality protein.



No. 5—cauliflower

This is a super food for Renal Failure patients. Not just because it contains fiber and folate, but also rich in vitamin C. moreover, you can eat it with many types, such as smash, steamed or boiled, whatever you or the kids like.







Those tips are just for those who concern their kidney health and who have already suffered from Renal Failure or some kind of kidney disease.

Nine Steps about How ESRF Happens

Several reasons trigger ESRF (End-stage Renal Failure), one of the major culprits is fibrosis. It is a fatal disease and would leave the patients in dangerous situation. However, the disease has some certain steps. By knowing the steps, we can detect the disease in early stage. Nine steps are:

1. Partial microcirculatory disturbance of damaged kidneys results from a variety of pathological damages (primary or secondary damages) incurs ischemia and oxygen deficit of kidney tissues.

2. Ischemia and oxygen deficit impair your vascular endothelial cells in kidneys.

3. Once the endothelial cells in kidney capillary vessels have been damaged, attracting the infiltration of inflammatory cells in blood circulation, in the meantime, morbigenous inflammatory mediators (IL-1 and TNF-α etc.) are released, which triggers the renal fibrosis. The pathological damages are responsible for the inflammation response of damaged kidney.

Local pathological changes of glomerulus would appear for the time being: Mesangial cell proliferation, mesangial matrix increasing.

Changes in glomerular basement membrane: filtered holes enlarge or shut; glomerular basement membrane ruptures; electrostatic barrier damages; permeability of kidneys strengthens.
Consequently, proteinuria and hematuria appear in clinic during this time, glomerulus would gradually progress to fibrosis and hardening afterwards.

4. Once renal fibrosis has been triggered, a series of cell factors and growth factors (PDGF and TGF-β) of renal toxicity are produced and released successively.

5. Those factors with renal toxicity would incur phenotype transdifferentiation of kidney functional cells (mesangial cells, epithelial cells and mechanocyte).

6. Phenotype of mechanocyte especially those in renal interstitium have been transformed, and then a series of uneasy degraded collagen fibrins (extracellular matrix--ECM) have been secreted and synthesized.

7. Owing to the increasing secretion of ECM, dynamic equilibrium mechanism fails to maintain the synthesis and degradation of ECM in kidneys, which is responsible for the reduction of synthesis and decrease of degradation to extracellular matrix in the kidneys, leading to a great amount of extracellular matrix to deposit and gather.

8. Owing to abundant deposition and aggragation of extracellular matrix, collective ECM replace the healthy functional nephrons accordingly, which results in the continuous hardening of glomerulus along with interstitial fibrosis as well as renal vascular fibrosis of renal tubulus.

9. The progressive fibrosis of kidneys causes functional nephrons decreasing, together with the persistent loss of renal function, consequently, fibrosis progresses to cicatrical tissues in the long run. Under this condition, End-stage Renal Failure--end-stage renal failure occurs eventually as functional nephrons are impaired completely and lost their function.

What to Eat When Taking Dialysis

Dialysis acts as an artificial kidney to remove metabolic wastes from your blood. It also changes everything especially your dietary habit. Food gives you energy and places a great influence to your condition. The wastes come from what you eat, that’s why Renal Failure patients should follow a restricted diet.

Dialysis diet should restrict the intake of potassium, sodium, phosphorus and others. Moreover, the diet should be changed according to Renal Failure patients' weight, blood test results and other reasons.

Eat a variety of foods and try to avoid taking same foods for a long time.

Ask your dietitian about your diet plan.

Avoid salty food so as to reduce the intake of fluid.

Potassium level rises when dialysis is performed, so my suggestion is to stay away foods high in potassium.

High potassium foods include banana, kiwi, cooked celery, tomato sauce and others.

Take right amount of phosphorus. High phosphorus in your blood will pull calcium from bones resulting in the weak bones. Too much phosphorus will make your skin itching.

Foods high in phosphorus include milk, cheese, colas and nuts etc.

High-protein diet should be followed.

Patients with Renal Failure doctor or dietitian probably encourages you to eat as much as high quality protein. The reason is that protein helps you repair your tissues. It also delivers you a better immunity to fight against infection or other diseases.

Meat, fish, eggs are good sources of high-quality protein.

Don’t take too much sodium because it would make you thirsty. Sodium is often found in salt. Taking too much sodium in a long time would trigger heart failure and high blood pressure.
Foods contain less sodium are fresh vegetables while high sodium foods include dill pickle, mustard, soy sauce, ketchup and so on.

Do not take vitamin or minerals. Your doctor will prescribe you mineral supplement. You’d better not buy them by yourself because over-the-counter vitamin or minerals can be harmful.
So many things you should remember to cooperate with your doctor when performing your dialysis. It can be hard for you, but you should stick to dietary restrictions.

Overview of Renal Failure

Renal Failure refers to kidney damages caused by various reasons, which leads to the loss of filtering ability in nephrons. When your kidneys lose their normal function, they can no longer balance fluids and electrolytes as well as metabolic products in human body, which responsible for high blood pressure, metabolic acidosis or uremia syndrome. All in all, Renal Failure describes a pathological condition that your kidneys partially or completely lose their function. According to the speed of its onset, Renal Failure can be divided into two types: Chronic and Acute Renal Failure.

Chronic Renal Failure

Chronic Renal Failure formally called Chronic Kidney Injury. According to its assessment of kidney function, Chronic Renal Failure can be explained in two aspects—general and narrow concepts. Chronic Renal Failure is caused by a variety of chronic kidney diseases in general concept. Various kidney diseases diminish the functions of excretion and secretion as well as regulatory ability, and cause the imbalance of water and electrolytes, all those cause azotemia.

In other words, the renal insufficiency in the whole compensated stage can be collectively called Chronic Renal Failure. On the other hand, narrow concept of Chronic Renal Failure refers to serum creatinine≥442μmol/L in compensated stage of chronic renal insufficiency.

Acute Renal Failure

Acute Renal Failure is also called acute uremia. Acute Renal Failure is a group of syndromes caused by renal or extrarenal pathological changes which is responsible for the sudden decline of metabolic products excreted by kidneys, abilities to balance water, electrolytes and acid-base.

Causes of Acute Renal Failure:

1) Prerenal oliguria, i.e. serious shortage in effective blood volume

2) Renal oliguria

Renal Oliguria occurs in severe glomerulonephritis, aminoglycoside antibiotics, serious systemic infections, hemolysis and biotoxins etc.

3) Postrenal oliguria

It occurs in acute urinary tract obstruction.

Clinical symptoms:

1) Oliguric or anuric phase

2) Phase of diuresis

3) Recovery phase

Our approach for Renal Failure—Immunotherapy

There are six steps of Immunotherapy.

Step No.1 Provides an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis for the disease.

Step No.2 Adopts brand-new medicines

Step No.3 Immune tolerance stage

Help your kidneys accept the fact that immune complexes deposit in the kidneys aiming to prevent the reoccurrence of immoderate inflammatory reaction which is called immune tolerance.

Step No.4 Immune-regulation phase in which give patients immune-regulation treatment.

Step No.5 Immune protection stage

Step No.6 Immune clearance

An Introduction of Immune System

Immune system is vital to one’s health. In order to know how it works, I write this article for all of you. Hope can help you.

What is immune system?

The immune system is a whole network of cells, tissues and organs, they work together to defend the foreign invaders. Those cells are involved in white blood cells, or leukocytes and so on. They focus on protecting your body from being attacked by millions of virus, bacteria, germs, toxins and parasites. Before knowing how it works, you should know what would happen if you lose it first.
When the living beings die,the system will stop working. What the consequences? The body will be invaded by the bacteria, germs and parasites after the system terminate their activities.
However, all those bad things can’t intrude as the system works normally. The consequences of invasive things, the body will be collapsed completely until nothing’s left. This is the purpose of our system.

Our immune system is complicated as well as interesting. It works day and night and being overlooked in most of time by most of us. One condition can draw our attention, that is, we will notice the abnormality of your system as it is disturbed. For example, when your finger is cut and then various viruses and germs access into your body, after that, it responds to that and heals your finger all by itself. Sometimes, the system will make mistakes, triggering the inflammation of the wound. Pustule and inflammation are all the side-effects coming from it.

The immune system will bring troubles as it fail to function. The consequences are various diseases. This is called autoimmune disorder. Normally speaking, the allergy is kind of over-reactive reactions. One more example, diabetes is caused by abnormal immunity and it attacks and destroys pancreas cells.

More often than that, this system will hold back some of our actions which is beneficial for us. For example, organ transplant is much harder than we thought, this is just because our own immune system resist the transplantation.

Why Renal Failure Patients Often Develop Puffiness

Puffiness or swelling is often associated with Renal Failure. It occurs when the body retains excessive fluid. This condition is medically called edema. It is often close related with Renal Failure or some other kidney diseases, puffiness acts as one of early signals of the disease.

Swelling can happen anywhere. However, the most common areas are ankles, feet, legs, face, chest and arms. It is caused by the leakage of fluid from small blood vessels. Aiming at this problem, one’s kidneys would retain water and sodium in the body. And then the small blood vessels release more fluid to the body, causing vicious cycles and makes fluid trap in the tissues. All those are responsible for the puffiness.

The puffiness can be caused by the following reasons:

▪ Nephrotic Syndrome

As one develops Nephrotic Syndrome, he or she would experience edema. This is caused by reduced urine protein. After low protein levels appear, the kidneys will retain more salt to build blood volume. As the result of this, excess fluid will be stored in tissues and causing swelling.

▪ Heart failure

Heart failure is defined as the heart fail to pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. It can be caused by many reasons, such as heart diseases, high blood pressure or coronary artery disease etc. when the heart fail to work efficiently, the puffiness would appear.

▪ Hypernatremia

Hypernatremia, as the name denotes, is induced by increased concentration of sodium in the blood. Sodium is vital to the function of muscles and nerves in human body. But too much sodium causes systemic puffiness and reduced urine output.

Swelling is often involved in Renal Failure, and acts as one of the earliest symptoms of kidney disease. Compared with blood in urine, it is much easy to recognize. I sincerely suggest those who experience edema, you’d better talk with your doctor immediately. Of course, puffiness doesn’t always occur as the sign of Renal Failure, but you can never to be too careful. Isn’t it?