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Kidney-Stone Therapy Link to Diabetes?

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Researchers said Monday that shockwave therapy for kidney stones appears to substantially raise the risk of diabetes later on.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said the commonly used treatment for kidney stones known as shockwave lithotripsy seems to significantly increase the risk for diabetes and hypertension later in life.

The therapy is administered to break up kidney stones that are too large to pass through the system naturally.

This is a completely new finding, said lead researcher Amy Krambeck. This opens the eyes of the world of urology to the fact that hypertension and diabetes are potential side effects. We can't say with 100 percent certainty that the shockwave treatment for the kidney stones caused diabetes and hypertension, but the association was very strong.

In fact, she noted that the risk of developing diabetes after shockwave lithotripsy is almost four times that of people treated medically for kidney stones, while the risk of developing hypertension appears to be one and one-half times the risk of patients treated with drugs.

The research team noted that the newly discovered risk seems to be higher based on the intensity of the treatment and the number of shocks administered. The hypertension risk appears linked to having the shockwave treatment done in both kidneys.

The Mayo Clinic study -- the first long-term research into the effects of shockwave lithotripsy over the long term -- focused on 630 patients treated with the procedure in 1985 at the Clinic.

Nineteen years later, of the 60 percent who responded to questionnaires, those treated with lithotripsy had 3.75 times the risk of having diabetes as those given other therapy, and lithotripsy-treated patients also had 1.47 times the risk of having hypertension than those getting other treatments.

The researchers said that, in comparing the two groups, patients were matched according to similar age, gender and initial time of seeing a urologist.