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Kidney pain
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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A typical pain syndrome in urology is kidney pain.
Kidney pain is a symptom of many diseases, which has a wide range of clinical significance: from functional disorders to conditions that threaten the patient's life. Being a frequent symptom in outpatient practice, kidney pain requires a rational diagnostic strategy, primarily from the perspective of a general practitioner who is often the first to encounter such patients.
It should be borne in mind that some patients suffering from kidney diseases (for example, a latent form of chronic glomerulonephritis) may not complain about kidney pain at all. In other cases, patients' complaints can only be general (weakness, fatigue, decreased performance, etc.), which sometimes gives no reason to suspect kidney damage and conduct a targeted examination. However, with many diseases of the kidneys and urinary tracts, there are usually quite typical complaints, among which an important place belongs to pain.
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Causes of kidney pain
Kidney pain can be caused by stretching of the kidney capsule (for example, with acute glomerulonephritis), pelvis (with acute or chronic pyelonephritis), obstruction of the ureter (concretion, blood clot) and its bend in some abnormalities of the kidney position, spastic contraction of the ureter, renal tissue ischemia (with a renal infarction).
Analyzing the pain in the kidneys, first of all pay attention to the localization and irradiation of pain. So, in a number of kidney diseases, pains are localized in the lumbar region. Incidentally, we note that for such a frequent disease, as is the case in chronic nephrological practice of glomerulonephritis, the pain is not characteristic at all. And with acute glomerulonephritis, they are often determined by patients not as pain in the lumbar region, but as a feeling of heaviness.