Kidney dysfunction increases death risk

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

For patients in hospital, even relatively small decreases in kidney function will increase mortality.
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a condition associated with reduced functioning. A team at the University of California, San Francisco, now reports on how AKI affected a group of almost 10,000 hospitalized patients. They did this by measuring increases in serum creatinine, a marker for AKI.

Around one per cent of patients had severe AKI and 13 per cent minor AKI. Both were more common among older, sicker patients and among those with low kidney function to start with. Patients with AKI at any level had higher mortality. Even at its mildest, it increased the risk of dying in hospital by 6.5 times. The patients with AKI also spent longer in hospital and had higher associated costs. Therefore it is important to look at how best to manage and treat AKI in hospital patients.

Source
American Journal of Nephrology November 2005