MILAN (ITALPRESS) – The kidneys have an essential role in maintaining balance in the body: they filter the blood, eliminate the waste, regulate the balance of the electrolytes, control blood pressure and contribute to the production of red blood cells; when the efficiency of the kidneys decreases drains and excess fluids accumulate, with consequences on the cardiovascular, nervous and musculoskeletal system that in the initial stages do not present obvious symptoms. It is estimated that in Italy a percentage between 7 and 10% of the population is affected by chronic kidney disease: according to the Italian Society of nephrology only 10% of patients are aware of their condition and followed by a specialist.
“The Italian data on dialysis patients is worrying: despite therapeutic innovations are always 50-60 thousand people. The pathology has changed: first were glomerulonephriti to bring in dialysis, now it is diabetes while glomerulonephriti have practically disappeared; although in Italy there has been an improvement in recent times, more than 2,300 transplants per year are made”, said Salvatore Badalamenti, head of the Nephrology and Dialysis operative unit and director of the department of Internal Medicine at the Clinical Institute Humanitas.
Most patients, Badalamenti explains, “does not have symptoms: when they arrive it is already too late and the patient already has a level 3 or 4 of creatinine, which is the indication of kidney dysfunction. To those numbers it is difficult to recover, there is little to do: in addition to dialysis you can do transplantation or try to postpone as much as possible the same dialysis with a hypoproteic diet, which risks taking the patient to dialysis a bit further but defecrated”. When the kidney function level becomes worrying, he adds, it is necessary to replace this “with a transplant or dialysis, which can be hemodialysis when it involves blood washing every two days or peritoneal dialysis that the patient can do at home. The difference does not concern efficiency, as the fact that the patient who does peritoneal must have a certain dexterity: if one thinks that now the patients who arrive in the hospital are all elderly diabetics, it means that at home they are not able to handle something that can lead them to serious infections; in Italy the patients in peritoneal dialysis are 15-20%”.
The Director of Internal Medicine of Humanitas focuses on what it considers the most effective tool to assess the health of its kidneys: “I am a great fan of the traditional urine examination: if this tells us that there is the presence of albumin or red blood cells dismorphic means that there is a kidney disease; when a patient with a level 2 of creatinine but with a normal urine test I do not worry, when it presents one with a level 1.5 of creatinine but with a lot of creatinine in the urine or globuli instead.
The last reflection of Badalamenti concerns the issue of prevention, compared to which “my suggestions concern first of all the food: we must make the kidneys work as little as possible, which would happen with a diet too rich in protein or however an excessive protein introit in a single meal; this would hyperfiltrate the kidneys. It also requires strict control of blood pressure: if you manage to keep less on the salt and more on the insect is better for the kidneys. As for drugs, many of them are heavy at the kidney level: for those who already have an insufficiency or malformation it is better not to add anything heavy. The polycystic kidney is the most frequent hereditary disease in humanity: a person in 700 has it, a genetic test is enough to recognize it.”.
– Photos from Top Medicine –
(ITALPRESS).
