3–20% of people who form kidney stones have medullary sponge kidney.Kidney stones are more common in people with Crohns disease; Crohns disease is associated with hyperoxaluria and malabsorption of magnesium.A person with recurrent kidney stones may be screened for such disorders. This is typically done with a 24-hour urine collection. The urine is analyzed for features that promote stone formation. Calcium oxalate
Calcium is one component of the most common type of human kidney stones, calcium oxalate. Some studies suggest that people who take calcium or vitamin D as a dietary supplement have a higher risk of developing kidney stones. In the United States, kidney stone formation was used as an indicator of excess calcium intake by the Reference Daily Intake committee for calcium in adults.In the early 1990s, a study conducted for the Womens Health Initiative in the US found that postmenopausal women who consumed 1000 mg of supplemental calcium and 400 international units of vitamin D per day for seven years had a 17% higher risk of developing kidney stones than subjects taking a placebo. The Nurses Health Study also showed an association between supplemental calcium intake and kidney stone formation.Unlike supplemental calcium, high intakes of dietary calcium do not appear to cause kidney stones and may actually protect against their development. This is perhaps related to the role of calcium in binding ingested oxalate in the gastrointestinal tract.
On the accuracy of splicing
The spliceosome is a very complex structure containing up to one hundred proteins and five different RNAs. The substrate of the reaction is a long RNA molecule and the transesterification reactions catalyzed by the spliceosome require the bringing together of sites that may be thousands of nucleotides apart. All biochemical reactions are associated with known error rates and the more complicated the reaction the higher the error rate. Therefore, it is not surprising that the splicing reaction catalyzed by the spliceosome has a significant error rate even though there are spliceosome accessory factors that suppress the accidental cleavage of cryptic splice sites.Under ideal circumstances, the splicing reaction is likely to be 99.999% accurate (error rate of 10−5) and the correct exons will be joined and the correct intron will be deleted. However, these ideal conditions require very close matches to the best splice site sequences and the absence of any competing cryptic splice site sequences within the introns and those conditions are rarely met in large eukaryotic genes that may cover more than 40 kilobase pairs. Recent studies have shown that the actual error rate can be considerably higher than 10−5 and may be as high as 2% or 3% errors (error rate of 2 or 3 x 10−2) per gene. Additional studies suggest that the error rate is no less that 0.1% per intron.