Kidney Disease Hospitalizations Soar

CDC Reports Hospitalizations Quadrupled From 1980 To 2005; Aging Population One Culprit

(WebMD)  The CDC reports a dramatic rise in the number of U.S. hospitalizations of kidney disease.

The annual number of those hospitalizations quadrupled from 1980 to 2005, according to the CDC.

That figure rose from about 416,000 hospitalizations in 1980 to 1.6 million in 2005, for a total of about 10 million hospitalizations from 1980 to 2005.

Those numbers are hospitalizations, not patients. Some kidney disease patients may have been hospitalized more than once.

Also, kidney disease wasn't always the reason for hospitalization. Some people were hospitalized for other reasons, including heart attack or heart failure. If their hospital discharge record noted kidney disease, that counted as a kidney disease hospitalization.

The rise in kidney disease hospitalizations was greatest in people aged 65 and older. Acute renal failure cases were up sharply, driving the trend. Acute renal failure refers to sudden and usually temporary loss of kidney function.

In 2005, acute renal failure accounted for 60% of kidney disease hospitalizations, up from 7% in 1980. Kidney disease hospitalization rates were consistently 30% to 40% higher among men than among women from 1980 to 2005, according to the CDC.

Why the increase in kidney disease hospitalizations? The CDC has two theories:

• The aging population. Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, which make kidney disease more likely, become more common with age. So an older population makes for more patients.


• Changes in the way acute renal failure is diagnosed, defined, or coded in hospital records. The National Kidney Foundation issued new guidelines on chronic kidney disease in 2002.

The kidney disease hospitalization statistics, based on discharge records from about 500 U.S. hospitals, appear in tomorrow's edition of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

[besscannon-2009]

Good Lord! Sounds like our doctors are killing us!
My son in law is in the hospital now with stage 5 renal failure and conjestive heart failure. Before he went in, he had been taking 30 different pills a day by subscription. I wouldn''t doubt some of them GOT him. Doctors aren''t even bothering to check drug interreactions before prescribing. Something should be done! The drug companies have a death hold on everything. Everything today is about greed
and even our lives don''t matter. Where will it all end? All the witnesses are going to be dead, killed of by the need to sell and prescribe more and more drugs. Who is going to be left to fight it? The victims still alive are too ill to go to court. It is scandalous!! Thank Mr. Bush for giving them the reins to the horse that is trampling us!!

[future121]

Doctors no longer work to resolve the real problem. They are too busy treating the symptoms with drugs. I am over weight but my doctor will not address it--even when asked! He wanted me to be on the Zeta--I refused because my cholestral issues have to do with my weight---not artifically reduce the symptom so he can ignor by real problem!

Doctors are reward for pushing synthetic drugs laced with side effects by Big Pharma. How many times have you hears someone died from Kidney Failure when they went in the hospital for something else? Medical Intervention is the # 1 cause of death in our country.
Side effects are totality ignored; prescribing is all that matter to the Physicians who are compensated for their writing efforts.

[abigail531]

I believe that doctors do not LISTEN to patients when they are telling them how they feel. I have to "FARM OUT" my body parts to specialists in order to get a diagnosis for any problem. I have seen the GI doctor for a few years, and she is not interested in what I say. Finally my new family doctor tested me and told me that I have a stomach ulcer. I went for a pre-op EKG, and it turned out to be abnormal. Now, my family doctor will not address this new developement, because he did not order the EKG. The surgeon will not address the abnormal EKG, because I am not able to have the surgery he was planning. I hope my husband get an enormous amount of money when I die from a heart attack!

[ajapierce]

I would like to state the fact that there is also a lo of kidney disease and problems with some of the new class of drugs that are out there now. There are new antibiotics that shutdown your kidney function while you are on them. Don''t you think that is causing some kind of long-term damage too? Making people and their kidneys more suseptable to kidney disease?

[freedomluvr]

The fact that drug makers have been pushing more and more drugs onto people doesn''t have anything to do with the rise in kidney disease/failure? Give me a break!