Prevalence of kidney stones doubles in wake of obesity epidemic

The number of Americans suffering from kidney stones between 2007 and 2010 nearly doubled from 1994, according to a new study by researchers at UCLA and the RAND Corp. "While we expected the prevalence of kidney stones to increase, the size of the increase was surprising," said Charles D. Scales Jr., a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Clinical Scholar in the departments of urology and medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Our findings also suggested that the increase is due, in large part, to the increase in obesity and diabetes among Americans." The study, "The Prevalence of Kidney Stones in the United States" is being presented today at the 2012 meeting of the American Urological Association in Atlanta, Ga., and will appear in the July print edition of the peer-reviewed journal European Urology. This is one of the first studies to examine new data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) that was collected from 2007 to 2010. NHANES is a program of studies within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the U.S. Scales and his colleagues reviewed responses from 12,110 individuals and found that between 2007 and 2010, 8.8 percent of the U.S. population had a kidney stone — one out of every 11 people. In 1994, the rate was one in 20.