I am on the twitter and I came across this tweet:
The tweet reads, “It annoys us at The Kidney Group when so-called experts claim being well-hydrated is overrated and without much merit. Completely untrue.”
The fact is this is total bullshit. Outside of patients with kidney stones or pre-renal azotemia, I am aware of no human data showing improved kidney function from increased fluid intake. In fact in the MDRD study they found an association with high fluid intake and faster progression to dialysis. Having a 24-hour urine volume of 2.4 liters was associated with a loss of kidney function of 1 ml/min/year faster than patients with a urine output of 1.4 liters.
In a comprehensive study on the risk factors for the development of ESRD (PDF) (27+ years of follow-up of 177,570 patients) having nocturia (HR 1.36) was about as important a risk factor as anemia (HR 1.33) or family history of kidney disease (HR 1.40) on multivariate analysis.
The authors take on the significance of nocturia:
It is interesting that nocturia (defined herein as self-report of “always having to interrupt sleep to urinate”) emerged as an independent risk factor for ESRD because it is a widely held clinical belief that nocturnal polyuria is an early sign of chronic kidney disease due to decreased urinary concentrating ability, although some data suggest that increased salt, not water excretion, is more important. Therefore, nocturia may reflect subtle early renal disease not captured by serum creatinine level or urine dipstick analysis. We also cannot exclude the possibility that nocturia reflects undiagnosed DM. An alternative hypothesis is that nocturia reflects a high volume of ingested fluid that is detrimental (especially among patients with existing kidney disease), as high urine volume increases intratubular volume and pressure and these stretch forces induce fibrosis. Practically speaking, our data lend no support to the notion that a high volume of water intake should be recommended in clinical practice as being beneficial to kidney function.
For a summary of the myth of water intake and kidney health look at this excellent review by Wenzel et al in CJASN (PDF).