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Review
. 2023 Feb 9;15(4):877.
doi: 10.3390/nu15040877.

Kidney Stone Prevention: Is There a Role for Complementary and Alternative Medicine?

Affiliations
Review

Kidney Stone Prevention: Is There a Role for Complementary and Alternative Medicine?

Adamasco Cupisti et al. Nutrients. .

Abstract

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is often implemented in kidney stone patients. It consists of preparations including different ingredients, such as herbs, probiotics, and vitamins, often together with alkali, that are classified within the dietary supplementation category. The majority of dietary supplements claiming to treat or prevent kidney stones contain ingredients with conflicting or no scientific evidence to support their claims. Clinicians should advise stone formers that the effects of most supplements are unknown or unstudied in humans and that the absence of evidence does not imply absence of potential harm. Unfortunately, the CAM preparation consists of a mix of different molecules, often including alkali, with different potential mechanisms of action and, even when favorable results are reported, the role of the single molecules cannot be assessed. Despite all these concerns, CAM products remain quite popular among kidney stone patients. The scarce knowledge in this field prevents one from recommending CAM products in daily clinical practice; only a weak suggestion for their use in kidney stone patients may be reasonable.

Keywords: complementary and alternative medicine; diet; dietary supplement; herbal products; kidney stone; urolithiasis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) for kidney stone prevention: reasons for common use in presence of poor evidence-based recommendations.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Prevalence of various ingredients in 30 products available on the market and claiming to treat kidney stones. Data are expressed as a percentage.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Number of ingredients per product contained in 30 preparations available on the market and claiming to treat kidney stones. The graph shows that the number of ingredients is variable, from only 1 to 16 components.

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