Understanding the challenges is the best way to
Most people don’t know how important kidneys are to a healthy body. So, they’re not thinking or talking about their kidneys.
There is limited awareness of kidney disease and its general risk factors.
Early symptoms, if any, are typically silent.
There is limited proactive testing.
Even when testing is conducted, traditional clinical kidney measurements
are not reliable when used as prognostic tools.
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Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) involves an increasing loss of kidney function over a period of months or years. The kidneys filter toxins and excess fluids from your blood, which are then removed in your urine. Advanced chronic kidney disease can cause dangerous levels of fluid, electrolytes and wastes to build up in your body, potentially resulting in kidney failure and detrimental to overall health. Untreated kidney failure can be life-threatening.
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People at risk for kidney disease have little-to-no awareness or knowledge about the disease nor what the consequences of their risk may mean, contributing to significant health disparities and inequity in care.
Various studies over the past decade underscore these findings.
<3%
of urban Black-American adults named kidney disease as an important health problem
18%
knew that being of Black-American descent, having diabetes (14%), experiencing hypertension (12%) and/or having a family history (2%) were among the key predictors of development and progression of kidney disease.
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Kidney disease does not typically present with early symptoms, so it is not identified nor documented by physicians early. That means the disease is not proactively managed nor sufficiently controlled. It is also why patients can lose up to 90% of their kidney function as the condition silently worsens.1
Patients can lose up to
90%
of kidney function
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The American Diabetes Association, the Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO), and the American Academy of Family Practitioners Guidelines all recommend both eGFR and UACR testing, once a year, for adult patients with type 2 diabetes and CKD. That said, this is not happening today, as evidenced by the ADA’s study, Chronic Kidney Disease Testing Among At-Risk Adults in the U.S. Remains Low: Real-World Evidence From a National Laboratory Database, published in 2021. It demonstrates that, despite current guideline recommendations, testing for CKD with UACR and eGFR in U.S. adults with diabetes and hyper-tension is low in routine clinical care.
The net:
80%
did not receive guideline-concordant kidney disease assessment (estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) testing during the study period).
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Estimated GFR and UACR levels are meant to diagnose whether kidney disease is present in a given patient and at what stage. They do not, however, predict which patients are at higher vs lower risk for disease progression or kidney failure.