Kidney disease impact millions of Americans and is often associated with other diseases such as diabetes and elevated blood pressure (called hypertension). The statistics about the prevalence and outcomes of kidney disease come from the United States Renal Data System (USRDS) which publish a report every year. The most recent available report to date is the 2017 report. These data support that kidney disease reached epidemic proportions.
Overall, almost 15 percent of the US general population suffers from chronic kidney disease (CKD) with more than 35 million people affected in the US and greater than three million in Canada. In other words, 1 in seven people reading this blog have some form of CKD. Diabetes and hypertension are the two main causes of CKD. Together they are responsible for more than %70 of t CKD. Unfortunately, as of December 31, 2015 more than 700,000 Americans developed kidney failure (also called End Stage Renal Disease or ESRD) requiring dialysis or kidney transplant. Women are slightly more likely to have stages 1 to 4 CKD. In addition, race and socioeconomic status plays an important role.
Stage 3 is the most common kidney disease
Sadly, kidney disease is called a “silent disease” because it has no symptoms early on and can go undetected until it is very advanced. On top of that, many of these patients have a hidden heart disease along with their kidney damage. Each year, kidney disease kills more people than breast cancer or prostate cancer. In 2015, more than 95,000 Americans died from kidney disease. Despite these staggering numbers, you do not see any effective national campaigns to raise awareness of kidney disease. Yet there is a glimmer of hope as the rate of new cases of ESRD has declined slightly since 2006.
But despite that, the prevalence of ESRD continues to rise because dialysis and kidney doctors are doing better job at keeping these patients alive and because the prevalence of type 2 diabetes continues to be on the rise.
Kidney disease is also costly. It is estimated that Medicare spending for patients with CKD ages 65 and older exceeded $55 billion. This is 20 percent of all Medicare spending in this age group. While dialysis patients in the US constitute 1% of the Medicare populations they account for 7% of its expenditure with up to $31 billion a year.
Conventional medicine has focused on the management of kidney disease, diabetes, blood pressure control and lipid control but so far this did not lead to the reversal of the CKD epidemic.
There is an urgent need to raise awareness of this silent killer and pursue an integrative medicine approach that pay attention to genetic predisposition, environmental exposure, diet and lifestyle modifications.
In the next blogs, we will talk about inflammation and the role of the gut and the “gut-kidney axis” in kidney health.
