• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Kidney Failure Rates Stabilize, Ending 20-Year Climb; Racial Disparities Persist

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 December 2005, 06:00 CST

By Anonymous

After 20 years of annual increases from 5 percent to 10 percent, rates for new cases of kidney failure have stabilized, reports the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. However, dramatic racial disparities persist.

In 2003, the rate for new cases of kidney failure was 338 per million population, down slightly from 2002 and continuing a four- year trend, allowing researchers to be cautiously optimistic that rate decreases have not happened by chance. The average annual increase has been less than 1 percent since 1999, compared with an average of 5 percent in the previous decade, according to the NIDDKs U.S. Renal Data System.

Diabetes and high blood pressure remain the leading causes of kidney failure. Diabetes rates for new cases in white Americans under age 40 were the lowest since the late 1980s. However, rates for African-Americans have not changed.

Credit for gains likely goes to clinical strategies proven in the 1990s to delay or prevent kidney failure: ACE-inhibitors and ARBs, which lower protein in the urine and are thought to directly prevent injury to the kidneys' blood vessels; and careful control of diabetes and blood pressure.

Copyright Health Forum Inc. Nov 2005

Source: Hospitals & Health Networks

More News in this Category