A combination of two common medical tests can improve a doctor’s ability to predict which patients will develop serious kidney disease, according to a research team led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
The finding also has significance for cardiovascular disease, which often goes hand in hand with chronic kidney disease.
More than ten per cent of the world's population has a chronic kidney condition, which means that the kidneys gradually stop working. In spite of this widespread prevalence, relatively few individuals develop severe enough renal failure to require dialysis or transplantation.
The catch has always been to figure out which of the patients with chronic kidney disease are likely to go on to the more severe and debilitating version of the illness, so that doctors can intervene early to try to prevent it.
A team of researchers led by Stein I Hallan at NTNU’s Faculty of Medicine has found that using two common medical tests – measuring creatinine in the blood and albumin in the urine – improves a doctor’s ability to detect early stages of serious kidney failure.
The researchers used data from the population-based Nord-Trøndelag Health Study to examine information from 65,589 adults. Of these, 124 progressed to end-stage renal disease after 10.3 years.
“High creatinine in the blood shows that the kidneys are doing a poor job of cleansing the blood, and means that kidney disease is already advanced. High albumin in the urine gives a measure of how rapidly kidney disease is developing”, says Hallan.
Hallan emphasised that both tests should be used together to assess the future risk of kidney failure. He thinks the method will be an effective tool in the treatment of this patient group.
Nephrology researchers at St. Olavs Hospital in Trondheim and NTNU have previously shown that the combination of the two tests is a very useful tool for assessing future cardiovascular disease risk, especially in older patients.
“Chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease often go hand in hand and should always be evaluated with a combination of blood and urine samples,” Hallan says.
Other researchers working on the study came from Ruperto Carola University in Heidelberg and the University of Regensburg, both in Germany.
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