First, the bad news — chronic kidney disease (CKD) can strike anyone.
As per latest medical data estimates, 17% of urban Indians suffer from kidney diseases. Worse still, diabetes and high blood pressure are the two main reasons that account for 40% to 60% cases of CKD in India.
‘Get screened’
“If you have these risk factors, it’s important to be screened for kidney disease. That usually involves simple laboratory tests — a urine test to look for kidney damage and a blood test to measure how well the kidneys are working. The urine test checks for a protein called albumin, which is not routinely detected when your kidneys are healthy. The blood test checks your glomerular filtration rate (GFR), which is an estimate of your kidneys’ filtering ability. A GFR below 60 is a sign of CKD, while GFR below 15 is described as kidney failure,” said K.K. Aggarwal of the Indian Medical Association (IMA).
Worsens without care
The association added that kidney disease often worsens without treatment. If your GFR drops below 15, you may feel tired, weak, nauseous and itchy, even vomit. You may need dialysis by then or worse, kidney transplant.
Optimal hydration is the key to maintaining good kidney health. Consuming plenty of fluids helps kidneys clear sodium, urea and other toxins from the body. This in turn results in “significantly lower risk” of developing CKD, which is also associated with metabolic disorders and bone disease. CKD is an important risk factor for peripheral vascular and cardiovascular diseases, and strokes.
Recurrent kidney stones
According to doctors, about half the people who develop a kidney stone suffer from the same problem at least once more at some stage. Lifetime prevalence of kidney stones is approximately 13% in men and 7% in women. Without treatment, approximately 35% to 50% of those with kidney stones will experience recurrence within five years of the first stone.
Meanwhile, preliminary data from the Indian CKD study has shown a corelation between CKD and alarmingly high levels of body mass index and waist circumference, thus highlighting the association between measures of obesity and development, and progression of CKD. The study is a longitudinal study that’s recruiting patients with kidney diseases early on with the aim of following up on them over a long period to identify the risk factors so that appropriate and timely prevention measures can be applied.
The study, funded by the Union government’s Department of Biotechnology, has been enrolling patients in nine hospitals across the country. A preliminary analysis of data of 1,500 patients with kidney diseases recruited for the study shows overall prevalence of obesity at 49%. However, the figure among women was a whopping 57%.
