Effect of a High Citrate Beverage on Urine Chemistry in Urinary Stone Disease

Exclusion Criteria

• •Investigators will exclude patients taking thiazides (indapamide, hydrochlorothiazide, and chlorthalidone). Our reasoning is that most calcium stone patients are not taking thiazides and such patients may be total body potassium-depleted (not necessarily reflected by serum potassium. Potassium depletion reduces citrate excretion (through effects on intracellular pH in the proximal tubule) so that patients taking thiazides could start with lower urine citrate excretion and have less of an increment in the Moonstone periods. The order of the periods might affect the magnitude of urine chemistry changes in those two periods.
• •Patients with chronic kidney disease tend to have reduced urinary citrate excretion due to mild metabolic acidosis. We will therefore exclude patients with estimated glomerular filtration rates (eGFRs) less than 60 ml/min/1.73 m2 calculated by the CKD-EPI equation. eGFRs will have been measured in the preceding year at a time when urinary tract obstruction due to USD was not present. We will also exclude women who are pregnant or nursing and people with any medical, psychiatric, debilitating disease/disorder, or social condition that in the judgment of the investigator would interfere with or serve as a contraindication to adherence to the study protocol or ability to give informed consent, or affect the overall prognosis of the patient.
• •The study will also exclude patients with a previous history of gastrointestinal intolerance, or any other intolerance of alkalinizing preparations. The proportion of USD patients who do not tolerate KCit is not clear. The Cochrane review on this topic states that there are adverse events reported with citrate therapy, but the effect was not statistically significant, in part because of incomplete reporting. Based on our experience, we usually cite this problem to affect about 10% of stone formers, with older people more frequently affected. We therefore do not think this exclusion criterion will have a sizable effect on enrollment.