Researchers Find 1 in 9 Adults Suffers from Kidney Disease

Associated Press, Washington — One in nine adult Americans has chronic kidney disease, but many don't know it and aren't taking steps to protect their damaged kidneys from getting worse.

Research by the National Kidney Foundation also says another 20 million Americans are at increased risk of getting kidney disease because they have diabetes, high blood pressure or other risk factors.

Those people need to get easy—and cheap—urine and blood tests from their doctors to see if they have kidney disease, according to the foundation's guidelines, published in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases (Nov. 2003).

It's "a silent disease" until the kidneys are severely damaged, Andrew Levey, chief of nephrology at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, said.

If detected early and treated, kidney damage can be slowed, said Levey, who chaired a panel of specialists that wrote the new guidelines.

The kidneys filter waste out of the bloodstream. With chronic kidney disease, the organs slowly lose that filtering ability, eventually becoming so damaged that patients die without dialysis or a kidney transplant.

Specialists have warned that end-stage kidney failure is increasing by 2% a year in the United States. Already, 300,000 American are on dialysis and 80,000 more are living with transplanted kidneys.

Until now, no one had a precise count of just how many people are living with earlier stages of chronic kidney disease, or how many are at increased risk of getting it. New government statistics allowed the National Kidney Foundation to do those counts.

Older people and people with diabetes, high blood pressure or a family history of kidney disease need tests for signs of impaired kidney function. The guidelines recommend two tests:

• People with kidney disease have increased protein in their urine. A simple urine test can be done either by a lab or in a doctor's office, using a special dipstick test that checks specifically for the protein albumin.
• The second test estimates the patients GFR (glomerular filtration rate, a medical term for how well the kidneys are filtering). A blood test that measures levels of the metabolite creatinine allows doctors to estimate GFR.

National Kidney Foundation: www.kidney.org