Researchers develop prognostic guide to kidney diseases for children

Although a prognostic guide to kidney diseases exists for adults, the first tool specific to children has now been uncovered.

Experts in pediatric kidney disease have published a new staging system to help doctors better predict the length of time until a child with chronic kidney disease (CKD) will need to undergo a kidney transplant or start receiving dialysis.

Study leader Susan L. Furth said, "We designed a clinically useful, data-driven tool for doctors and nurses to advise parents and plan treatment, based on when a child's kidney disease is likely to progress to the need for transplant or dialysis."

Healthcare providers currently rely mainly on their own clinical experience to estimate when their patients' condition will progress to end-stage renal disease.

The researchers drew on two large multicenter study consortia of children with chronic kidney disease. The Chronic Kidney Disease in Children (CKid) study gathered data on 891 patients from North American centers.

The study team concluded that a combination of three factors provide the best predictors for estimating disease progression: glomerular filtration rate (which measures how efficiently the kidney filters waste products from the blood), proteinuria (the presence of protein in the urine), and whether the CKD is caused by a glomerular or nonglomerular etiology.

The team also found that children with the glomerular disease had a faster disease progression than those with a nonglomerular disease--a 43 percent shorter interval.

The full findings are present in the journal- American Journal of Kidney Diseases.