Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Heart Matters on ReachMD. Today, we’ll hear from Dr. Daniel Edmonston, who’s an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, as well as a Member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. He’ll be talking about who’s at risk for chronic kidney disease. Here’s Dr. Edmonston now.
Dr. Edmonston:
The clearest guidance from consensus guidelines for who should be tested for CKD are really people with diabetes. And we know that people with diabetes should receive annual CKD testing starting at the time of diagnosis for people with type two diabetes, or five years after diagnosis for people with type one diabetes.
The guidelines also note that people with hypertension should be tested, as well as those with other risk factors for chronic kidney disease, such as prior acute kidney injury, established cardiovascular disease and known structural abnormalities of the kidney and genitourinary tract. Those will definitely be things that will require some level of testing for CKD.
More recently, and I would say particularly relevant for the cardiologist, are the recommendations published just this year for CKD testing in the cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic, or CKM, guidelines. A full discussion of CKM is really its own talk, but it is a wonderful paradigm that lays out really how the shared risk factors for cardiovascular disease, including CKD, of course, but also hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, and metabolic syndrome can influence the risk of downstream cardiovascular disease. And these CKM guidelines indicate that anyone with CKM stages two to four—so this would span the risk factors that I just mentioned all the way up through overt cardiovascular disease—should receive annual CKD testing. To me, this is the clearest recommendation for CKD testing, for most clinicians, especially cardiologists, to follow in these at-risk individuals.
Announcer:
You just heard Dr. Daniel Edmonston highlighting the patients that are at risk for chronic kidney disease. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Heart Matters on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!