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Research on effects of acute kidney injury

It is common every year in people who are hospitalized: acute kidney injury, or AKI for short. In AKI, the kidneys suddenly can’t clean the blood as well as before. This is very bad for your body and can sometimes even lead to irreversible, chronic kidney damage. Research has now been conducted at UMC Utrecht into the consequences of AKI.

“It was previously suspected that patients with severe or long-term AKI (three days or longer) have an increased risk of developing chronic kidney damage (CKD), but that for mild or short-term AKI this was not as bad. Now we have also shown that even mild or short-term AKI increases the risk of CKD in the long term,” says UMC Utrecht physician-researcher Denise Veltkamp.

The new study shows the importance of paying attention to kidney function in patients with advanced acute kidney injury (AKI). Says Denise, “Because so many patients experience mild or short-term AKI, it is now up to us to further investigate who within that group is most at risk for long-term CKD.”

Improve care for patients with acute kidney injury

Now that it appears that AKI, a condition that is widely prevalent each year, can also lead to chronic kidney damage, the Kidney Foundation has an additional focus on this issue. “The goal is to improve care for patients with acute kidney injury to reduce kidney function loss and promote recovery. This can help reduce the risk of permanent kidney damage, cardiovascular disease and kidney failure,” said Stijn Gremmen, Innovation & Valorization program manager at the Kidney Foundation.

Read the entire news release on the Kidney Foundation website 

About the acute kidney injury study

Physician-researcher Denise Veltkamp of UMC Utrecht conducted a systematic review based on a large number of worldwide studies and recently published the results in the scientific journal Nephrology, Dialysis, Transplantation. The review’s analysis indicates that the risk of CKD for individuals who have had a short-term AKI is as much as 200 percent higher compared to those who have not had an AKI.

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