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| - Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny announced a hunger strike in prison three weeks ago to demand medical treatment for back pain and numbness in his limbs, months after narrowly surviving a poisoning attack. Here's what we know about the health of President Vladimir Putin's most outspoken critic: Navalny, 44, announced he would stop eating on March 31 in a protest to demand medical treatment for a sore back and the loss of feeling in his legs. Even before he started the hunger strike, allies said he had lost a significant amount of weight in detention. They said that Navalny weighed 93 kilograms (205 pounds) when he arrived in prison but that that figure had fallen to 85 kilograms by April 1. Navalny's wife Yulia who visited him in prison last week said he was down to 76 kilograms. After complaining of back pain, Navalny said on March 26 that a prison doctor had given him two painkillers but did not provide a diagnosis. Weeks later, in response to his decision to launch a hunger strike, he said prison authorities threatened him with force feeding. Russia's prison service said Monday Navalny was being transferred to a hospital for inmates but said his condition was "satisfactory". The prison service also said Navalny had agreed to take vitamins. He had previously said he was undergoing a "hardcore" hunger strike and would only consume water. Navalny's physicians late last week published results from a blood test that showed high potassium levels and elevated creatinine. The results, they said, could indicate Navalny was suffering from impaired kidney function and risked cardiac arrest. "Our patient can die any minute," cardiologist Yaroslav Ashikhmin said on Facebook, adding that Navalny should be moved to intensive care. Navalny's allies said he was unlikely to have taken the decision to refuse food lightly, since he had only recently recovered from exposure to a Soviet-designed nerve agent. Navalny fell ill on a flight last year in an attack he blamed on the Kremlin and was taken to Germany for treatment. Russian authorities denied any involvement. Western labs found that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, the same toxin British police said was used in the attack on former spy Sergei Skripal in the English town of Salisbury. Navalny said he had been in a coma for 18 days and had had to learn to speak and walk again during his recovery. He was detained on his return to Russia from Germany earlier this year. Last week, his team said in an Instagram post quoting him that prison doctors had held back from examining him out of fear of "it will turn out that the loss of sensation in my limbs may be associated with this poisoning." acl/jbr/jv
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