Are you overweight? Living with diabetes? Have high blood pressure?
You could have kidney disease right now and not know it.
You wouldn’t be alone.
One-in-10 adult Americans currently has some level of kidney disease. When the disease progresses to kidney failure, patients need regular dialysis treatments or a kidney transplant to survive.
Kidneys clean your blood of toxins, filter out waste and regulate your blood pressure.
When they don’t work right, you don’t feel right. You’re tired. Feel nausea. Have swollen feet and ankles. Have trouble sleeping. It’s difficult to do things that used to come easy.
But kidney damage can happen without symptoms you notice. Results of simple lab tests at your doctor’s office could be your only clue until you have an advanced and serious problem.
Treatment options
If you have kidney failure, a transplant offers the best chance at life like it was before you were sick. But organs to transplant are scarce and transplantation is not a cure.
Most people with kidney failure — 450,000 in the United States alone — are on dialysis, a treatment where a machine does the kidneys’ work.
Most people get dialysis at a clinic. Others, including almost 300 of Northwest Kidney Centers’ 1,600 patients, do self-dialysis at home. They have more schedule flexibility and can travel more easily. They can also spend more time in treatment, which is important because the more dialysis you have, the better you feel.
But you still have kidney failure. Healthy kidneys work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Dialysis doesn’t.
Although people with kidney failure can live well with dialysis or a kidney transplant, the fact remains that kidney disease is a very serious and often irreversible condition.
An epidemic
The number of people with kidney disease is growing. According to the United States Renal Data System, the number of prevalent end-stage renal disease patients increased by more than 3 percent in 2015 compared to 2014.
Today, in the United States, nearly 700,000 people have end-stage renal disease.
But that’s nothing compared to what’s projected.
The number of Americans with diabetes is expected to double or even triple by 2050.
Since diabetes is the leading cause of kidney disease, the number of people with kidney failure will rise quickly too.
Unless we make a big change.
Dialysis patients are tough. They have to be. They’re connected to a machine at least three times a week, for four or five hours each time. They’ll tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, to take any steps possible to prevent kidney disease.
Not tomorrow.
Not next week.
Right now!
The good news is that kidney disease due to diabetes is preventable. A low-salt diet, full of fruits and vegetables, and 30 minutes of exercise every day will help stave off diabetes, high blood pressure and thus kidney disease.
Replace salty restaurant meals with fresh produce and home cooking. Be careful with packaged microwave snacks. Don’t eat foods that contain more than 400 milligrams of sodium in a single serving.
Get regular checkups and ask your doctor to check your kidney function if you have diabetes. Control your blood pressure.
Don’t be the 1-in-10. Change your lifestyle now to prevent kidney disease.
March is National Kidney Month and March 10 is World Kidney Day.
Learn more at: www. nwkidney.org/prevent-kidney-disease
Joyce F. Jackson is president and CEO of Northwest Kidney Centers, a not-for-profit, locally managed provider of kidney dialysis, public health education and research.
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