Do You Realize
How Important
Your Kidneys Are?

Do you know that hundreds of thousands of people suffer from kidney failure each year and undergo dialysis or await a kidney transplant. According to Renal Data System of United States Annual Data Report which was released in 2000, there is an increase of kidney patient from 1998-2008 for almost 200%!!

Actually what do your kidneys do? Why are they so important? Don't they just produce urine? In this article, we will take a close look at our kidneys and find out exactly what they do.

The kidneys are a pair of bean-shaped organs that lie on either side of human spine in the lower middle of human back, and they shaped like kidney bean. Each kidney weighs about ¼ pound or about 0.5 percent of your total body weight, about the size of your fist. Although the kidneys are small organs by weight, they receive a huge amount (20 percent) of the blood pumped by the heart. Each kidney contains approximately one million filtering units called nephrons. Each nephron is made of a glomerulus and a tubule.

The kidneys are connected to the urinary bladder by tubes called ureters. Urine is stored in the urinary bladder until human ready to empty their bladder. The bladder is connected to the outside of the body by another tubelike structure called the urethra.
 

Kidney is one of the most important organ in our body, and here are the main functions of kidney:

v      Filtering blood to remove waste products and toxin.The kidney does this by a combination of three processes:

Ø  Filtering 20% of the plasma and non-cell elements from the blood into the inside of the nephron.

Ø  Reabsorbing the components that the body needs from the lumen back into the blood.

Ø    Secreting some unwanted components from the blood into the lumen of the nephron.

Anything (fluid, ions, small molecules) that has not been reabsorbed from the lumen gets swept away to form the urine, which ultimately leaves the body. Through these processes, the blood is maintained with the proper composition, and excess or unwanted substances are removed from the blood into the urine.

v     Regulating the composition of the blood involves:

• Keeping the water volume in your body constant
• Removing wastes from your body
• Keeping the acid/base concentration of your blood constant
• Keeping the concentrations of various ions and other important substances constant

v       Produce certain hormones that have important functions in the body, include:

1. Erythropoietin (EPO) - Stimulates the bone marrow to  produce red blood cells.
2. Renin - Regulates blood volume and blood pressure
3. Activate form of vitamin D ( calcitriol or 1,25 dihydroxy-vitamin D) - Regulates absorption of calcium and phosphorus from foods, promoting formation of strong bone.

If someone has kidney problems, then all of the function above can not work well. Could you imagine how it will be? So, that is the reason why kidney is the one of the most important organ in our body.

Kidney disease is well known as a non-contaminating chronic disease, but it causes many of dangerous disease include stroke, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and also coronary heart disease.
 

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