Is Shrinking Kidney Serious for Patients

One patient told me that he always felt fatigue and took test for the causes. The test reports said that he had already shrinking kidneys. For it is heard that shrinking kidneys means renal failure, now he is worried about the health of kidneys. Is shrinking kidney serious for patients?

Causes of shrinking kidneys

It is indeed that renal failure can lead to reduce the size of kidneys. However, there is another situation—interstitial nephritis. It is caused by the inflammation in the renal tubules, tubulointerstital and renal intersititium. Many factors would damage in these part of kidneys. For example, autoimmune disease, drugs, poisons, infection, metabolin deposition and so on.

In the structure of kidneys, renal inerstitium takes apart more room, so kidney is easily withered when renal interstitium are damaged. However, it would not give a heavy blow to your body, the main filtering tissues—glomeruli are not hurt. So patients have no life danger temporarily.

However, renal failure is great damage in the glomeruli which is the main tissues for filtering blood. When most glomeruli are dead, kidney will also shrink in size. However, withered kidney in this situation is a fatal hurt for people’s health. Excess water and wastes cannot be discharged from the body and continue destroying kidney tissues. So people should know which tissues are damaged.

Tests for damaged tissues

In many hospitals, doctor only can tell you what exact tissues are damaged by renal biopsy that is an invasive examination. Our hospital can provide a series of non-invasive examination for patients to tell the damaged tissues. Urinary protein electrophoresis is the test to distinguish the protein in urine according to their molecular weight. If there is too much big molecule protein, it means that glomeruli are damaged. While, if small molecule protein presents in urine that means destroy in renal tubules and renal interstitium.


According to these results, physician can give you more accurate treatment for the shrinking kidney. If you are confused, you can have a try to these tests and get better soon.