Recognizing Early Signs of Kidney Trouble in Kids

Kidney disease in children can be sneaky, progressing slowly with symptoms so subtle they’re easily missed until it reaches advanced stages and the damage is irreversible.

These bean-shaped organs filter waste from the blood and regulate fluids. While we have two of them, most childhood kidney diseases impact both, which makes early detection, diagnosis and treatment critical to slow its progress, reduce complications and improve quality of life.

What Can Go Wrong

Birth defects that keep the urinary tract from developing normally cause up to 60% of chronic kidney disease in children in the United States. Many of these anomalies can be reversed medically or surgically. Among children 12 or older, 45% of cases are due to nephrotic syndrome, an umbrella term for damage to the kidney’s tiny filters, allowing protein to leak from the blood into the urine. Other causes of kidney disease include:

• Hereditary diseases like polycystic kidney disease, which causes cysts to grow in the kidneys, damaging them over time

• Infection in another part of the body could reach the kidneys through blood or urine
• Systemic diseases like lupus that affect many organ systems
• Traumatic injuries from an accident or surgery
• Urine blockage or reflux allow urine to flow backward into the kidneys, sometimes carrying infection

Silent Symptoms

Early diagnosis and treatment are critical with kidney disease, yet it typically begins silently. Children in early stages may have no symptoms, or symptoms like fatigue or reduced appetite that could easily be missed or attributed to something else. Other generalized symptoms to watch for include:

• Trouble concentrating
• Weakness
• Weight loss
• Stunted growth

None of those alone indicates kidney disease and could be due to other conditions, but you should definitely bring such concerns to your child’s pediatrician and discuss the possibility of early kidney disease. A relatively inexpensive urine test could confirm or rule out your suspicions.

As kidney disease progresses, more symptoms may emerge, but they will vary from child to child and from one disease cause to another. You should get your child to the pediatrician as quickly as possible if any of these occur:

• Swelling in the feet, legs, hands or face, especially around the eyes (confused with allergic reaction)
• Increased or decreased urine output, including bed-wetting
• Foamy urine due to too much protein
• Pink or cola-colored urine caused by blood in the urine
• Nausea or vomiting
• Shortness of breath
• High blood pressure

Diagnosis and Treatment

If your child’s pediatrician suspects kidney disease, a urine test will be ordered to look for blood, protein or other anomalies. This test is not routinely ordered in asymptomatic children, so you may need to request it.

If there is something wrong with the kidneys, you may be referred to a pediatric nephrologist, a doctor who specializes in children’s kidney diseases. Additional blood work, urine tests and imaging will help identify the cause of the problem. Sometimes your doctor will need to examine a tiny sample of kidney tissue, which is removed in a procedure called a biopsy.

Chronic kidney disease has been called a silent killer because it usually goes undetected until damage is advanced, leading to dialysis and transplant. This is why parents, who know their children best, are essential to early diagnosis. By requesting a simple urine test, you could help catch your child’s kidney disease, get them into treatment and minimize damage.

This content is not AI generated.