(VitalNews.org) – Lauren Kasper, a nurse who works at a dialysis center in Atlanta, spoke out about what she’s dealt with from patients that have kidney disease.
Kasper stated that she was quite surprised by how many of her patients were young. “The majority of the patients that you would see in a typical outpatient center are sixty-plus,” she said.
She continued, “With these patients, some of them were in their twenties and their thirties, forties. The fact that they were a really significant portion of the population was really startling.”
According to the study Kasper co-authored, many of these patients were in the landscaping, roofing, or agriculture careers where they were exposed to extreme heat and chemicals, and this heat-stressed environment may have led to a greater risk of kidney disease.
Said Kasper, “It’s not just the heat, it’s that humidity too – that combo is so hard on the body and can be so dehydrating for people,”
Over the summer, many people who worked outdoors dealt with some of the highest recorded heat in the United States, which caused much more heat-stress for them. When the body is exposed to extreme heat, the cardiovascular system goes into overdrive trying to keep the body at a safe temperature.
Experts said that these functions can take a toll on organs such as the heart and kidneys. Over the last decades many people have been showing up in dialysis centers across the globe with severe kidney damage. One interesting factor to look at is that none of them had any typical risk factors like an autoimmune disease or diabetes.
Roxana Chicas, a registered nurse and professor at Emory University, said, “This is probably multifactorial, multiple things coming together, merging and making the perfect storm for farm workers to suffer kidney dysfunction.”
Chicas continued, “But I do think that dehydration is one of the biggest players along with heat exposure – the high, ambient heat that they’re exposed to, and working really hard.”
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