Kidney failure and crack connection?

Now that I'm getting older I'm finding my body parts are blowing fuses.

I've got kidney stones, that's plural... one of them is 14 mm, WOW that's 9/16th of an inch.

Here's a link about crack smoking (cocaine use) and kidney failure:

http://ndt.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/15/3/299

warning... this block of text uses 'high dollar' words. Doesn't make for easy reading. But you'll get the drift - crack (cocaine) is hard on your kidneys.

In this excerpt, you'll see the word: Renal Failure, click on this link to find out what that means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renal_failure

Cocaine and end-stage renal disease without rhabdomyolysis

Several patients with accelerated or malignant hypertension have been described in whom the habitual use of cocaine appears to have hastened the development of renal failure, often requiring dialysis [8,9]. The patients had smoked cocaine for several years, often continuously, and presented with severe hypertension and renal insufficiency. Blood pressure was extremely elevated, often quite out of proportion to the degree of end organ damage and frequently quite refractory to treatment. It has also been described that scleroderma renal crisis, characterized by accelerated hypertension, rapidly progressive renal failure and hyperreninaemia can be precipitated by heavy cocaine abuse [10]. Surprisingly, hypertension may be absent on presentation and severe renal arterio-arteriolosclerosis without hypertension has been reported after cocaine use [11,12]. Apart from rare cases with renal infarction [13], antiglomerular basement membrane antibody-mediated glomerulonephritis [14] or acute interstitial nephritis [15], the mechanisms leading to renal insufficiency after cocaine abuse are at present not clear.

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