The Rising Kill Count of Kidneys

Kidney Disease: Predetermined or Your Fault?

Chronic kidney disease, or CKD, is results in the slow loss of kidney function, impairing the body's ability to filter waste and excess fluids from the blood. In its later stages it can lead to serious complications such as kidney failure, requiring dialysis or a kidney transplant. The article by NEJM talks about CKD that is genetically inherited, and why it is important to get a diagnosis and manage your symptoms. It specifically mentions the significance of identifying single-gene variants that can increase chances of CKD. This is very important going into the future, as a significant portion of the population is being affected by CKD. As shown in the infographic below (NIH), Approximately 1 in 10 people are affected by CKD, and it has become the 12th likely cause of death as of 2017, with the ranking projected to reach 5th by 2040. 

These are scary and significant numbers. Thankfully research is being done to find root causes to this disease, and to figure out how to best help those who are affected.

Currently, the research being done includes "Genome-Wide Association Studies," which are used to identify genetic variants across a genome, allowing a specific gene that may lead to this disease to be found, as well as "Soft-Clustering Algorithms." This is something I am completely unfamiliar with, and the article did not mention what method they were using, so I will provide the summary of what is said by the NIH to have the best performance. "Fuzzy clustering by Local Approximation of MEmbership (FLAME)24 is a soft clustering approach that has the ability to capture nonlinear relationships and nonglobular clusters, automate definition of the number of clusters, and identify cluster outliers, ie, genes that are not assigned to any cluster" (NIH). Basically, the researchers use (unknown which) soft-clustering algorithms to analyze genetic data. This approach helps in mapping out the variation of CKD by grouping similar genetic variants, which they believe will lead to a better understanding of the disease's constituent parts.

I think this is a very important area of research, but I don't understand how this will directly help those affected, or the mortality rate. I believe more research should be done into the prevention of the disease in those who don't have genes linked to the cause of this, so that both parties can be helped. If research is only done into the genes of those who are likely to develop the disease, and not the effects the genes have on the individuals, then we are still at square one in terms of lessening the lethality of the disease. I look forward to (hopefully) seeing rankings in the cause of death chart to go back down to 19th or lower.

Links

https://www.kidney.org/kidney-topics/chronic-kidney-disease-ckd

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2411473

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9073222/