Dehydration & kidney health. Image credit: Healthgrades
Health experts have urged Nigerians to embrace drinking water regularly, warning that frequent dehydration can cause permanent kidney damage and renal failure.
According to the experts, studies have confirmed the importance of water to important body cells, tissues, and organs, especially in ensuring that they keep working optimally. Studies, they added, have also confirmed the grave damage that dehydration causes to the kidney.
The health experts stressed that adequate hydration, is even more critical when running a fever, experiencing diarrhea, or after exercising the body, noting that proper hydration should be seen as critical to healthy living.
Speaking with HealthWise, one of the experts, a family physician, Dr. Ibraheem Kuranga explained that water remained crucial to the proper functioning of the human system, adding that it helps keep the blood vessels open so that blood with important nutrients can travel freely to the kidneys.
He stressed that it becomes harder for the delivery system to work when the body is dehydrated.
Dr. Kuranga argued that while the kidney cannot be easily damaged, continuous water deprivation can destroy the kidney cells.
He urged Nigerians to devise ways to take up to three litres of water daily, disclosing that chronic medical illnesses like severe hyperglycemia in patients with diabetes could also easily predispose them to kidney failure.
He added, “There is no specific water intake that is strictly prohibited but take enough to your satisfaction at the time you are feeling like taking water. However, if you engage in any activity that drains you of your body water, then rehydrate yourself to feel normal again.
“If you are not involved in strenuous exercise and the weather is not hot, two to three litres may be enough for adults daily and this can be achieved by eating twice daily.
“Kidney is one of the organs that regulate body water. It is not easily damaged except in a chronic (prolonged) state of water deprivation as in drought or a disease state with severe dehydration or with the intake of nephrotoxic agents that directly destroy kidney cells.
