Everyone needs potassium to survive. Potassium is a mineral and an electrolyte. It helps your muscles work, including the muscles that control your heartbeat and breathing.
Potassium comes from the food you eat. Your body uses the potassium it needs. The extra potassium that your body does not need is removed from your blood by your kidneys. When you have kidney disease, your kidneys cannot remove extra potassium in the right way, and too much potassium can stay in your blood.
When you have too much potassium in your blood, it is called high potassium, or hyperkalemia. Having too much potassium in your blood can be dangerous.
High potassium can even cause a heart attack or death! If you have kidney disease, you are at risk for high potassium because your kidneys cannot remove the extra potassium in your blood.
Instead of leaving your body through your urine, the extra potassium in your blood travels through your kidneys and back into your bloodstream. Over time, more and more potassium can build up in your blood. Many people do not feel symptoms of high potassium. It can even cause a heart attack. If you have trouble breathing or think there could be a problem with your heart, call for emergency help.
When you have too much potassium, your heart may beat irregularly, which in the worst cases, can cause heart attack. The only way to know for sure if your potassium level is healthy is to have a blood test. The test measures how much potassium is in your blood. The blood test is like many other blood tests that you may be familiar with. A small needle is placed into a vein on your arm and your blood is drawn out into a tube.
The blood is sent to lab to be tested. Potassium may be called something else in your test results. A potassium of higher than 5. Talk to your doctor about what your test results mean. Because very high potassium higher than 6.
In this case, they may ask you to go to an emergency room or hospital. Medicines for high potassium are called potassium binders. A potassium binder works by sticking to the potassium in your body and preventing some of it from being taken into your bloodstream.
This helps to keep potassium from building up in your blood. The medicine is a powder, which you can take by mixing it with water and drinking. Talk to your doctor about whether a potassium binder could be an option for you. If you learn that you have high potassium, your doctor might suggest that you change your diet to take in less potassium.
Talk to your doctor or dietitian about how much potassium you should have and how you can control how much potassium you eat. Potassium is needed for cells to function properly. You get potassium through food. The kidneys remove excess potassium through the urine to keep a proper balance of this mineral in the body. If your kidneys are not working well, they may not be able to remove the proper amount of potassium. As a result, potassium can build up in the blood.
This buildup can also be due to:. There are often no symptoms with a high level of potassium. When symptoms do occur, they may include:. Your provider will likely check your blood potassium level and do kidney blood tests on a regular basis if you:. You will need emergency treatment if your potassium level is very high, or if you have danger signs, such as changes in your ECG.
If the cause is known, such as too much potassium in the diet, the outlook is good once the problem is corrected. In severe cases or those with ongoing risk factors, high potassium will likely recur.
Call your provider right away if you have vomiting, palpitations, weakness, or difficulty breathing, or if you're taking a potassium supplement and have symptoms of high potassium. In acute hyperkalemia, which often results from a particular event, such as trauma, doctors may use dialysis and intravenous medications to flush potassium from the body. Typically, a person with hyperkalemia does not experience any symptoms, which means that doctors may overlook it until symptoms worsen.
Acute hyperkalemia, or significant changes to potassium levels over a short time, is more serious than having chronic hyperkalemia, or regularly high potassium levels.
However, both acute and chronically high potassium levels can be dangerous, potentially causing heart attacks or paralysis. At higher levels , symptoms of hyperkalemia include:. There are different causes of hyperkalemia:. If there is a risk that a person may develop hyperkalemia, a doctor might recommend limiting foods that contain high levels of potassium.
According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans , the highest-potassium foods per serving size are:. Hyperkalemia often has no symptoms. This means doctors often find it challenging to diagnose. Doctors often use dialysis for hyperkalemia that requires urgent treatment. Dialysis involves filtering and purifying the blood to reduce total body potassium levels. People with kidney failure or urgent hyperkalemia will benefit the most from dialysis.
In acute hyperkalemia, doctors prescribe the following treatments to lower potassium levels:. Treatment options for chronic hyperkalemia include changing medications, avoiding NSAIDs, and reducing consumption of potassium.
Loop diuretics may also be a useful treatment for some types of chronic hyperkalemia. Treatment for hyperkalemia varies according to whether it is acute or chronic. Acute hyperkalemia is more urgent and dangerous than chronic hyperkalemia and requires rapid treatment, such as dialysis. Some groups of people are more likely to experience hyperkalemia.
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