Corticosteroids and Kidney Disease: Corticosteroids, Prednisone Avoid Side Effects CKD and Steroids

Today’s video is about corticosteroids and kidney disease. Corticosteroids are the prescription steroids not the anabolic steroids I did a previous video about. Anabolic steroids are the ones to build muscle to improve athletic performance. These are prescription corticosteroids that are given to help kidney diseases are given for a variety of other conditions but we’re focusing on kidney disease the most common being prednisone there’s also cortisone hydrocortisone a whole bunch but prednisone most commonly given for kidney diseases.

This medication depletes a lot of nutrients this whole class so we’re going to talk about what nutrients you might want to consider taking in supplement form. Depending on the type of kidney disease you have you may be prescribed a corticosteroid prednisone being the most popular one. Now if you’re going to use this medication for a month or longer you tend to see side effects hopefully not but some people see a lot of side effects and it’s for because the drugs natural way it works and cause side effects but a large part too is it depletes a lot of nutrients which lead to a lot of side effects. This information is coming from RX Answers. It’s a database which basically pools studies so you can just look at a drug see what it does the nutritional depletions and then it links studies to each of those.

So this is all evidence-based so something you should take into consideration these databases are sold and used by a variety of professionals organizations pharmacies hospitals. So let’s get into it and most likely your doctor never told you anything about this because he may not know or it’s just not considered important to them. Most likely they just don’t know because they’re not looking at these things. If you’re going to take prednisone for a month or more some of the nutrients that it depletes that you should be taking are vitamin d. Now you should be taking vitamin d anyway if you have kidney disease most likely so make sure you have it tested and you may need to increase it. Vitamin d calcium it does deplete we know and there’s no debate on this that these corticosteroids long term can put you at a higher risk for fractures osteopenia osteoporosis.

Now with kidney disease it’s a little tricky to take calcium and you’re already at a higher risk of all those bone issues because you have kidney disease. so calcium is a tricky thing that you want to take you really want to only take it if it’s justified meaning you’re going to be on the medication long term. Make sure you don’t have calcification of the arteries so go see a cardiologist. Everybody with kidney disease should see a cardiologist at least once a year so make sure you don’t have any calcification of the arteries and if you are going to take calcium take a low dose don’t go for the big high doses yet because of the risk to the kidneys. You want to take maybe three to 500 to maybe 600 milligrams of calcium check with your doctor first make sure that’s okay and that’s only if you can do this long term. You want to take it with food ideally and you want to take one of the more higher absorption forms calcium citrate calcium hydroxyapatite is one and there’s a couple others but calcium carbonate doesn’t absorb as well but it can help bind some of that phosphorus so it is an option. Like I said just be careful with that calcium supplementation, check with your doctor check with your cardiologist.

If you’re having trouble sleeping it’s because these cortical steroids they lower your melatonin levels. Melatonin is a natural hormone that your body needs and it regulates the sleep wake cycle so I had an issue with prednisone back then where I could not sleep when I did this many years ago over 20 years ago I didn’t know that it depleted melatonin back then but we know now so if you’re having trouble sleeping try melatonin. A natural sleep hormone sold over the counter three to ten milligrams you want to try at night start with the lower doses work your way up if you find yourself waking up groggy which is common with melatonin try two try one and a half try one if you’re taking ten try five you gotta play around till you find the right dose for yourself but it’s excellent with kidney disease also helps protect your kidney.

Next nutrient is selenium or selenium. We talk about this in a lot of other videos this is commonly low in people with kidney issues so you want to make sure you supplement with it b6 as a nutrient that gets depleted which will lead to side effects. Now when I talk about all this a really good way to go is to take a fairly good multivitamin. You can take the individual nutrients like you can take the vitamin d separately the calcium but for your selenium b6, all the b vitamins you need you should be getting a decent multivitamin The prescription renal vitamins out there they’re not that good if you look at the back label or even the non-prescription renal vitamins if you look at the back label they don’t have all the b vitamins they’re missing a lot of things. so um

Any decent multivitamin not the one a days by Centrum, I generally don’t recommend those, a good one a day from a whole foods, a health food store someone that sells vitamins should be good. Take a multivitamin because also you do deplete vitamin a zinc, so the multivitamin covers all those vitamin c. You should watch your potassium levels, corticosteroids can lower potassium levels generally in kidney disease that’s a good thing.