Polycystic Kidney Disease

BioS

Pasting some of my research on increasing GFR:

You can raise your eGRF by 30 points by doing this:

+10 points : Selenium + Coenzyme Q10
+10 points: Activated charcoal (2g) + Cascara

10 points: Astragalus (Not a big fan of herbs, but if you need the increase, it is worth it)

Look at the screencaps in the tweet for reference studies: https://twitter.com/bioenergy_space/status/1748065253554880635

Also targeting fibrosis is critical. Suggest looking into pentoxifylline

brad

@shitty_kidneys Moved it for you.

shitty_kidneys

@BioS Thanks for the info! I will look into fibrosis reduction and pentoxifylline.

Kappakd

@BioS why no fan of herbs?

BioS

@Kappakd Many off-target effects and can be heavily contaminated

@shitty_kidneys said in Polycystic Kidney Disease:

I know there is not much in the way of good treatments for this specific disease. I also cannot seem to find any good data on the effectiveness of current diets/treatments. Please let me know if you have any anecdotes/stories.

So far the treatments seem to be:
Blood Pressure Control to 110/70 (No data on how much this reduces cystogenisis)
Tolvaptan (Caps out at ~25% eGFR reduction prevention per year and only mild cystogenisis reduction in the first year, then grows the same as it did)
Keto diet (very little data on this too, one study says no statistically significant difference)
Other than that it appears to be a very slow but unstoppable time bomb.

According to Ray Peat, fibrosis happens when inflammation is high. Lowering inflammation would be key, I think.

Ray Peat on fibrosis

[What Is Polycystic Kidney Disease?](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/kidney-disease/polycystic-kidney-disease/what-is-pkd

What to do (from the article linked above)
"Reduce stress. Long-term stress can raise your blood pressure and even lead to depression. Some of the steps you take to manage your PKD are also healthy ways to cope with stress. For example, getting enough physical activity and sleep helps reduce stress."

I find it irritating that so many "technical" articles like this do such a poor job of explaining what "stress" is and how to reduce it. I'm pretty sure the stress that needs to be reduced is body stress on the cellular level.

Ray Peat on Stress

Inflammation causes stress on the cellular level. It makes sense to me that addressing this in multiple ways would be really helpful for kidney health. Because I personally experienced massive improvement in my own cellular stress issue via high dose thiamine hcl, I'd like to include a couple of links for your consideration regarding thiamine and stress.

The impact of oxidative stress in thiamine deficiency: A multifactorial targeting issue

Interactions of oxidative stress with thiamine homeostasis promote neurodegeneration

A search for "thiamine and fibrosis" yields articles about thiamine and multiple types of fibrosis: cardiac, pulmonary, etc. but I couldn't find one specifically on the kidney. However, there seems to be quite a few articles about diabetes, kidney disease, and thiamine deficiency. Diabetics are known to be thiamine deficient; evidently, they dump too much thiamine out via their kidneys.

Vitamin B1 Could Reverse Early-stage Kidney Disease In Diabetes Patients

I also take a pretty high dose of magnesium glycinate (3 grams/day). Magnesium also lowers body stress on the cellular level.
Ray Peat on magnesium

also, here's this article:
Magnesium Status and Stress: The Vicious Circle Concept Revisited

notmcas

Is the vitamin d 50ng/dl or higher, and are you getting enough calcium relative to phosphate? Ray has mentioned that many kidney issues get better with supplementation.

BioS

Fibrosis is the main thing in PKD. Pentoxyfiline and ARBs are drugs that lower it consistently in studies. Bemethyl (synthetic soviet actoprotector) seems to increase GFR quite a bit according to anecdotal reports. Selenium and Vitamin E may also counter fibrotic changes.

yerrag

@shitty_kidneys said in Polycystic Kidney Disease:

Other than that it appears to be a very slow but unstoppable time bomb.

Other than PKD looking unsightly, why do you consider it a time bomb?

I don't have it, but wonder if it could be mischaracterized mainly for being hideous, and instead of seeing as harmful, is it possible the cyst(s) is (are) protective because they wrap pathogens to where they don't proliferate, enclosed in a tough coccoon?

I am myself cursed with keloids that keep getting worse. I also have temporal arteritis, which is a bulge on my temple. They are benign and they are hard to get rid of. But because they pose no harm, they are low in my priority list. But mainly so because I believe them to enclose microbes that my immune system cannot destroy and so my body did plan b- to enclose and isolate these microbes.

I wonder if the cysts in the kidneys are anything like my keloids.

BioS

@yerrag said in Polycystic Kidney Disease:

I also have temporal arteritis, which is a bulge on my temple. They are benign and they are hard to get rid of. But because they pose no harm, they are low in my priority list.

Temporal arteritis does not "pose no harm." It can lead to irreversible blindness in a question of hours if it flares up. It's fine if you believe that it is harmless, but spreading the idea that it is can lead to serious harm to others.

yerrag

@BioS

It is a matter of opinion.

Your argument may have merit, but I should buttress my post by saying that temporal arteritis is an adaptation by the body to protect it from a harm that is more immediate and that if it poses harm it is a relatively lesser harm as it pushes the harm into the future. Just as what the body does with fibrosis. If there were no present danger that were greater, fibrosis would not occur as there is no purpose served by developing fibrosis than to stave off a present danger towards a future reckoning.

I also should state that correlation does not prove causality. It is too common in the practice of modern medicine to lose sight of that, and even more common for it to blame the savior as the culprit of a misdeed by mere association and lose even an inkling of what is cause and what is effect, and make a total mess of forensics, and thus do the equivalent of a mob lynching.

This is anecdotal, but a cousin recently passed away due to a heart condition, and died of a heart attack. But he died at a ripe age of 85, and I have less reason to worry about my temporal arteritis as he had one for a long time. He was a type 1 diabetic, and had long been on insulin injections. What stood out about him was that he had a full head of thick black hair, with little or no evidence of graying.

Uroš

@shitty_kidneys

This migh help:

"After five weeks of treatment with BHB in the drinking water, rat polycystic kidneys were "nearly indistinguishable" from normal ones."

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-10-reversing-polycystic-kidney-disease.html