Children With Kidney Disease | Treatment Ideas For Children With Kidney Disease

Welcome back to today’s video about children with kidney disease and what you can do if your child is going through kidney disease or kidney failure. We’re going to reference some studies.

We’re talking about children’s kidney health. As a parent I can’t imagine what that’s like to have your child going through kidney disease, but what I would recommend if your child is going through kidney disease is get the opinion of three pediatric nephrologists. That’s outside of any of these research I’m going to quote. The reason is is we come across a lot of children with kidney issues here at healthy kidney inc with parents looking to support kidney health with diet, nutrients, things of that nature, and when I see a lot of the results and what comes in a lot of things aren’t being addressed.

This isn’t new this is like any other nephrologist I talk about other videos about picking the right nephrologist. You should at least get three nephrologist opinions. Let’s get into some other stuff that came out in the last month or so. A study here from Pediatric Nephrology: February 2020 to Evaluation of the Relationship Between Serum Carnitine Levels and Intradilictic Complications in Children with Kidney Failure. So these are children that were on hemodialysis and they were having complications like low blood pressure and cramping.

What they found that a lot of these children had deficiency in carnitine. L-carnitine is the is the full nutrient name. L-carnitine is amino acids that your kidneys have a large role in producing and making and L-carnitine helps with energy production by taking your fatty acids and helping them go through the mitochondria. It’s a little energy factor in your cells. When you have kidney disease there’s a pretty high rate of carnitine deficiency and and in my time in this field I’ve only seen one doctor, one nephrologist ever test for it. This is not something tested.

This is an over-the-counter supplement. Carnitine is an amino acid. Your body makes it from certain foods. You can buy it in supplemental form, so if your child is on dialysis having complications it’s worth to try carnitine for a certain period of time. You can get it in liquid pill form. There’s a couple sport liquid forms meaning they’re for sports performance because l-carnitine you’ll find that a lot is sold for sports performance.

You can use those as long as it doesn’t have a lot of other bad chemicals and caffeine or anything like that. You can get powder forms. With a child you want to start around thousand milligrams in that area. You can work your way up or decrease it depending on the response but it may help some of those complications and side effects that come from hemodialysis in children.

We have another piece of research here Impact of Anemia on the Cardiovascular Status in Children With Chronic Kidney Disease. This is from the Clinical Nutrition Aspen Journal, February 2022. What happens is part of the heart, the left ventricular hypertrophy got larger. They didn’t function well when there was anemia present in children with kidney disease. Anemia is is bad for kidney disease and there’s still a lot of people professionals that don’t pay any attention to it.

You have anemia and you have kidney disease it makes all the heart complications that come along with kidney disease much worse. You’re going to accelerate the loss of kidney function, so you’re going to lose kidney function faster if you stay anemic for periods of time and you’re not going to feel well. You will have a poor quality of life. There’s more cell damage oxidative stress so anemia it has to be treated. There’s a lot of safe irons, we have multiple videos on anemia and kidney disease and that’s why I really recommend seeing a couple professionals, a couple nephrologists when it comes to this because one person may not address it.

I’ve seen it so many times before and there is still the very outdated idea that anemia doesn’t affect kidney disease, but it does it affects the quality of life, it affects the kidney itself, it affects the heart complications heart problems more and more if you’re anemic. So if your child is on kidney disease you may not know how to read the blood work so check out our other videos and get the opinion of a couple different professionals. That’s going to prevent you from one person missing it or not addressing it or that person’s got hundreds of patients and he just doesn’t have the time to think about everybody’s case. He’s just trying to manage medications.

This is what happens in reality. This is what happens in practice all the. Maybe the guy or lady is going through a divorce and guess what her practice is not going to be functioning that well. She’s not going to be thinking about your about your blood work and what is going on with your kidney disease. So multiple opinions is very important.

Last one here: Potassium and Fiber: A Controversial Couple in the Nutritional Management of Children with Chronic Kidney Disease Pediatric Nephrology: January 2022. Dietary potassium and fiber intake are closely related but not associated with circulating potassium levels in pediatric ckd.

So if you just look at the recent video I talked about potassium is that unless there’s a problem, you don’t want to restrict potassium foods. Don’t have a lot of the potassium-rich foods but don’t restrict them because you’re missing fiber a key component to supporting good kidney health. Then you’re missing all the nutrients and then you’re missing some a little bit of potassium. You actually need a little extra potassium for kidney disease but you don’t want to go high at a range so you miss out on some of these key nutrients. What they’re saying is the potassium is not a problem. Generally it’s not something you should avoid unless there’s a problem in children that have kidney disease.