Marathons Injure Kidneys
Six years ago, a study from Michigan’s William Beaumont Hospital found that about 40 percent of runners suffer acute kidney injury after marathons.
That sounds bad. Is it? Should I never run another marathon? Never run more than a few miles? Never leave this chair?
The nephrologist Chirag Parikh, a professor of medicine at Yale, was unsure what to tell his patients. He knew that running marathons tends to be associated with at least temporary kidney damage, but he didn’t know how or why exactly that happened.
Today he’s a step closer to understanding, as his lab has published a new elaborating on the relationship. In one of, Parikh found that the rate of acute kidney injury was likely closer to 75 percent. And the effect was not subtle. “We demonstrated that there is the same amount of injury and inflammation after marathon running that we see in patients coming out of cardiac surgery or in the ICU,” he told me.
