Many patients with kidney disease are taking hormones. Why do they take hormones? Why does taking hormone make your face fat?
1. Most nephropathy is closely related to immune reaction and inflammatory reaction.
Most nephropathy is the damage caused by immune reaction and inflammatory reaction. The most common is the deposition of circulating immune complexes in renal tissues, or the antigen of glomerulus itself becomes the object of immune reaction, etc. There are also kidney damage caused by various inflammatory cells and inflammatory mediators.
Therefore, the most common kidney disease is more or less related to the immune system, so appropriate anti-inflammation and suppression of the immune system according to the disease condition can achieve good therapeutic effects.
2. [Hormones] Have Wonderful Effects
Clinically, if [hormone] is mentioned separately once, most of the time it refers to the glucocorticoid secreted by the adrenal cortex, which has nothing to do with sex hormones such as estrogen and androgen. This hormone is also synthesized and secreted by the human body under normal circumstances. Common glucocorticoid drugs include dexamethasone, hydrocortisone, prednisone, methylprednisolone, etc.
Glucocorticoid is a very important drug in modern medicine, It has a wide range of physiological and pharmacological effects, In nephropathy, its anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive effects are mainly used to fight against injury. Even more powerful immunosuppressants such as cyclophosphamide are sometimes used to save lives and delay the progress of nephropathy. Of course, not all nephropathy will be treated with hormones. Specific problems need to be analyzed specifically, and the choice of drugs needs to be decided by doctors.
3. Long-term high-dose use of hormones has side effects.
Long-term high-dose use of glucocorticoids has an obvious side effect-drug-induced Cushing’s Syndrome. Its manifestations are the same as adrenocortical hyperfunction. It can be summarized as [full moon face], [buffalo back], [concentric obesity], [thin skin], etc. These patients generally have normal weight range. However, more body fat is distributed to the face and trunk, Limbs are not fat (search [Cushing’s syndrome] can see a picture of typical body shape). The mechanism of this peculiar fat distribution characteristic has not been fully studied. The current finding is that limbs are more sensitive to glucocorticoid, which increases fat catabolism in limbs, but in general, fat in such patients is increased.
4. Medicine is a process of weighing pros and cons.
In this case, why use hormones for a long time? This is medicine, Weigh which is more important. In most kidney diseases, kidney damage is difficult to reverse. If hormone/immunosuppressive agents are not used in sufficient amount in time, some menacing kidney diseases will kill people in a short period of time. If they come slowly, they will develop to the point that no amount of kidney function can be used after some time, and finally they can only be maintained by repeated dialysis.
Special Author of Clove Garden: West China Hospital Cardiac Surgeon Li Xiao
Copyright of Clove Garden. No reprinting is allowed without permission.