Summer Tips to Avoid Kidney Stones

This is a pain you never want to feel. Women say it's worse than labor pains. A kidney stone is a sharp piece of matter lodged in your delicate and nerve-rich urinary tract, which has spasms and tries to expel it. Ow!

And this condition tends to happen more often in summer. A summer diet of barbecue -- and extreme sweating that substitutes for urination -- can be the kidney stone's best friend.

"Extreme pain," confirms Wendy Weinstock Brown, MD, chief of staff of the VA Tennessee Valley Health Care System and a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University and Meharry Medical College. "That's why people come in. My dentist even called me at 3:00 in the morning when he had a kidney stone," she tells WebMD.

What Causes the Agony?

Bryan N. Becker, MD, head of nephrology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the "profound degree of pain" can radiate down the side and belly and can be accompanied by nausea and vomiting. "It cycles," he tells WebMD. "It lets up, starts again."

Kidney stones usually contain the mineral calcium, says Becker. The stones result when a person has a slight problem with how calcium traverses the kidney and the millions of cleansing tubes in there that are filtering out waste. Infection can also cause stones to build up, or a person may get a backup of uric acid, a normal substance in the body that can increase with ingestion of meats and alcohol, among other things. Uric acid can crystallize and form stones.

"A large percentage of people have calcium in their kidneys they never know about," Becker says.

"The stones are made up of lots of things," Jerry Yee, MD, division head of nephrology and hypertension at the Henry Ford Hospital, tells WebMD. "Calcium, phosphate, uric acid, oxalate --all things we eat." Usually, if this is going to crystallize and attach to other elements in the urinary tract and form a stone, this happens in midlife, between age 25 and 50, he says.

Who Is Most Likely to Get Stones?

Although some doctors maintain that summer is the time when most people will experience a kidney stone, Becker says he has not seen data proving this. "I do know," he says, "they call the Southeast the stone belt."

Brown says hot weather and dehydration are the culprits, so summer might be a likely time. "This is more common in the Southeast," she says. "But also among soldiers in Iraq."