Medical comorbidities associated with pediatric kidney stone disease

Objectives: To characterize the relationship between pediatric kidney stone disease and the presence of hypertension (HTN), diabetes mellitus (DM), and obesity. In adults, kidney stone disease has been associated with medical comorbidities such as HTN, DM, and obesity. Similar analyses have never been performed for the pediatric population.

Methods: The 2003 and 2006 Kids' Inpatient Databases were queried to identify subjects treated for kidney stone disease ("International Classification of Diseases" codes 9592.0 and 592.1). The comorbidities of HTN, DM, and obesity were identified using the provided comorbidity software. The risk of kidney stone disease associated with age, sex, and comorbidity status was evaluated using multivariate logistic regression.

Results: A total of 6,115,443 subjects were evaluated. Of these, 14,245 (0.2%) had a diagnosis of upper tract calculus (4092 boys and 10,045 girls, sex unavailable for 108). Age was the strongest independent predictor of stone risk (P < .0001). HTN was associated with a significantly increased risk of stone diagnosis in children ≤10 years old and DM for children ≤5 years old. Stone risk was not affected by obesity in any age group.

Conclusions: The results of our study have shown that kidney stone disease is significantly associated with age among all children and both HTN and DM for young children. Although exploratory, these findings are novel and suggest that kidney stone disease among young children might be associated with nonrenal, systemic disease states.