Keeping all your organs healthy is an important part of healthy living and aging. In particular, the health of your heart and kidneys is interlinked.
Heart problems often lead to kidney problems if your heart issues aren’t treated, and the reverse is also true. Understand from Thomas Nguyen, MD, of Nguyen Medical Group in Boynton Beach, Florida, how these two major organs are connected.
Your heart works to move oxygen and nutrients through your blood vessels and deliver them to your tissues. At the same time, it helps regulate your blood pressure and remove waste like carbon monoxide.
Your kidneys remove waste products from your blood supply and keep your body’s water content balanced. They also play a role in regulating your blood pressure and creating red blood cells.
When they’re healthy, your heart and kidneys work symbiotically, ensuring your heart receives clean, healthy blood and your kidneys receive sufficient oxygen and blood to remove waste. But when either has issues, the other can develop problems, too.
When your kidneys and heart don’t work as well as they should, they can cause problems with each other and throughout your body. These are some examples of how these organs can interact.
High blood pressure is a condition in which your heart has to work harder than it should, regularly, to pump blood through your body. This changes how your kidneys work, causing them to keep more blood and sodium in your body.
Over time, this strain on your kidneys can lead to kidney damage. This can cause you to develop kidney disease, a serious condition that causes your kidneys to lose function gradually over time.
Without treatment, kidney disease can lead to kidney failure and premature death.
If you have kidney disease, you can also develop problems with your heart, even if your heart was previously healthy. This is because having kidney disease makes it harder for your kidneys to remove waste from your body fluids.
The build-up of waste makes your arteries stiffer and smaller, putting stress on your heart and causing high blood pressure. Long-term, this can cause medical emergencies like strokes and heart attacks.
