By IANS
New Delhi : One out of every 10 Indians – that is 100 million from among over a billion Indians – suffers from some form of kidney disease, according to an expert from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
The country’s top government hospital here is to organise a national convention on preventing kidney disease from Feb 16. Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan wil inaugurate it.
“Kidney diseases and kidney failures are alarmingly increasing worldwide, including in India. In India one out of 10 persons has some form of chronic kidney disease,” Y.K. Gupta, a professor of pharmacology at AIIMS, said Thursday.
Chronic kidney disease is a broad term that includes various degrees of kidney damage – from stage one to stage five, the latter is also known as end-stage kidney disease which requires either dialysis or kidney transplant.
Worldwide over 1.5 million people, including tens of thousands of Indians, continue to live on dialysis and with kidney transplants.
Doctors said prevention of kidney diseases is a major challenge for both authorities and medical practitioners across India in 21st century.
“Diabetes and hypertension are responsible for more than 60 percent of chronic kidney disease (CKD) cases. Nearly 15 percent of adults in urban India are diabetic and 40 percent of them are likely to develop kidney problems,” Gupta said.
Doctors said about 20 percent of the adult Indians are hyper-tensive and many of them will develop CKD. Many CKD patients also die of cardiovascular complications.
AIIMS authorities said every year over 150,000 new patients of stage-five CKD require dialysis or kidney transplant.
“But less than 10 percent are able to get some form of these treatment and rest die without getting any definite treatment,” Gupta added.
High costs and non-availability of kidney donors are major limitations in successful treatment of chronic kidney disease. Because of this, people resort to even illegal means to get kidney transplant.
The police from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh last month unearthed an illegal kidney transplant racket worth billions of dollars, going on for about a decade. It involved obtaining kidneys illegally from poor labourers, often under force, and transplanting them to patients from many countries like Canada, Greece, the US and Turkey.
The kingpin of the racket, Amit Kumar, was arrested last week from a resort house in Nepal.