5- Nausea and vomiting
In many cases, kidney stone pain is severe enough to cause nausea and vomiting as well. Gastrointestinal symptoms are frequent during acute pain caused by kidney stones. Nausea and vomiting are often accompanied by anorexia and loss of appetite.
Pain puts your whole body in stress, and severe pain causes very intense stress that triggers nausea and vomiting. Pain from the abdominal organs travels via afferent neurons to reach the central nervous system. The pain signals are processed in the brain and integrated into a special system in the brain called emetic centre. From this area, the efferent emetic signals go down through the central nervous system and start causing the sensation of nausea and vomiting. There are two different centres that trigger vomiting: one located in the medulla of the brain that’s activated first, and the second one is called integrative vomiting centre, and it is the one that controls vomiting as a reflex.
Sometimes, nausea is not severe enough to cause vomiting in the event of kidney stones. When emesis starts, it is often not severe enough to cause electrolyte problems. However, special care should be given to the elderly and infants because they often experience electrolyte imbalances more easily than young adults, and such additional health problem might become life-threatening.
