Chronic kidney disease in the spotlight on World Kidney Day celebrated around the world on March 10, 2022
Chronic kidney disease strikes about 10% of the adult population in the world: 1 out of 10. In Italy, the patients who are in the average or advanced states of the disease are almost 4.5 million.
Numbers constantly increasing due to the aging of the population and the climate change which profoundly affects the state of health of the kidneys. Yet seven out of ten Italians have not never made specialist visits for kidney control and only 12.3% have had them in the past 3 years.
This the date shock which emerges from the ‘Bridge the knowledge gap’ survey conducted by AstraRicerche per la Italian Society of Nephrology on a representative sample of the adult Italian population. One in two Italians admits to not knowing who the kidney specialist is (46.0%) and, among those who think they know him, one in five incorrectly answers ‘urologist’ (21.9%).
Only one in 7 people (13.4%) think they know what Chronic Kidney Disease is, while just under half of the population (48.8%) admits that they have only heard of it, but do not know what it is (38.2% do not just heard of it). This is the picture of a country with an important information gap that is widening among the younger population groups.
‘This data- he explains Piergiorgio Messa, president of Sinformer director of the complex operational unit of nephrology, dialysis and kidney transplant polyclinic in Milan and full professor of nephrology at the University of Milan – is in line with that of the diagnostic delay which is registered for chronic kidney disease, so it is evident that the health of the kidneys is concerned not with a view to prevention or early intervention, but when the disease is at an advanced stage such as to require the dialysis or transplant. Kidney diseases rarely give clear and recognizable signals, and for this reason they are often discovered by chance, at an advanced stage, during tests carried out for other reasons’.
A level of awareness inversely proportional to the numbers of chronic kidney disease. If we talk about familiar with kidney diseasein fact, 21% of the sample claims to have had or currently have kidney disease, while as many as 42.3% say that it has happened to one or more relatives. Currently 4.4% of respondents report having kidney disease, and one in ten (9.2%) say that kidney disease affects their relatives.