According to researchers at the University of Texas, more Americans are predisposed to suffer from kidney stones in the coming years, as a result of global warming.

Kidney stones, which usually arise from dissolved minerals in the urine, can be awfully painful and are regularly attributable to dehydration, either by not drinking sufficient amounts of liquid or losing too much because of high heat conditions.

If global warming drifts persist as predicted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, the United States can expect a 30 percent increase in kidney stone ailments in some of its most arid regions, said the report released in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, the enlarged frequency of the disease would represent between 1.6 million and 2.2 million cases by 2050, costing the US financial system approximately one billion dollars in treatment charges.

Neutralizing the effects of temperature may be as simple as getting people to drink more water. However, specialists said that persuading an entire region of the country to change drinking habits could prove complicated.

The head author of the study, Tom Brikowski, weighed kidney stone rates against UN forecasts of temperature growth and conceived two mathematical patterns to calculate the impact on future populations. One formula proved a boost in the southern half of the country, including the already existing “kidney stone belt” of the southeastern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The other procedure showed that the expansion would be concentrated in the upper Midwest. Moreover, the study added that “similar climate-related changes in the prevalence of kidney-stone disease can be expected in other stone belts worldwide.”