Chronic Kidney Disease Has Increased Sharply

Know anyone with kidney problems? Well you ain’t seen nothing yet. A 30 percent increase in chronic kidney disease over the past decade has prompted the U.S. Renal Data System (USRDS) to issue, for the very first time, a separate report documenting the magnitude of the disease. Chronic kidney disease now affects an estimated 27 million Americans and accounts for more than 24 percent of Medicare costs.

What is the deal of spending BILLIONS of dollars to treat rather and to prevent kidney problems. What about using diet and nutrition, herbals, chiropractic or acupuncture to keep the liver healthy? Perhaps there is not much money involved there. Total cost for end-stage kidney disease alone is now $33.6 billion. In addition, more than 18,000 kidney transplants were performed in 2006, an increase of 3.5 percent over 2005.

Use of deceased donor kidneys increased between 2003 and 2006 at a rate of about 6 to 7 percent. Use of living donors fell 3 percent during that period, but the use of living unrelated donors continues to increase relative to the total number of living donations, and now accounts for 45 percent of all living donor transplantation. If we can’t get donors and some donors who may not even have healthy kidneys to donate, the trend would be to make more kidneys. Seriously, more money will be poured into bioengineering, organ culture, etc. Prevention and teaching the public to take care of the health of their kidneys? Probably, zero.

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