Most people cannot answer or speak to the question of how does diabetes cause kidney failure. The process itself is important to understand so that it doesn’t happen to you. Rather than start off by answering the question of how does diabetes cause kidney failure, it is helpful to understand a little about what defines kidney failure and what the ramifications are.
The most common kidney failure cause is diabetes. And every year, over 100,000 people in the United States alone will be diagnosed with kidney failure. It is a very serious condition, and it is the final stage of chronic kidney disease.
The most common cause of kidney failure is diabetes. About 44% of all new cases are diabetes related. As recently as 2005, about 24 million people in the US had diabetes, and of those, 180,000 or so were living with kidney failure. It requires dialysis or transplantation to live with, and besides the toll on quality of life, and the mortality rate, it is estimated to cost the United States about 32 billion dollars a year in unreimbursed cost.
Is there a better question to be asked than “How does diabetes cause kidney failure?”
Perhaps, instead of diabetics asking “how does diabetes cause kidney failure”, a better question should be “How how can I prevent my diabetes from causing kidney failure?” As usual, prevention is always better than the cure, and since over 70% of kidney failure is caused by either diabetes or high blood pressure, better control of these conditions offer better hope than trying to live after kidney failure has set in. But we can start with the first question.
So, how does diabetes cause kidney failure?
Diabetics don’t develop kidney failure overnight. It takes years to develop. And the insidious part of this information is that the kidney functions at a higher level in the first years of diabetes. This not only can delay controlling diabetes out of complacency, but also can hide the damage that is occurring.
Over the span of years, people who are getting kidney disease leak small amounts of blood protein known as albumin into the urine. The kidney function is usually close to normal during this period.
As the disease moves along, more of this protein leaks into the urine. This stage is called proteinuria. As this leakage increase, the kidney’s filtering function begins to degrade. This is really the answer to how does diabetes cause kidney failure. The wastes begin to accumulate in the kidney as the filtering process gets less effective. This damages the kidneys, and will often raise blood pressure. This failure usually occurs somewhere in the 15 to 25 year period after developing diabetes type 2. If you make it past 25 years, the question of how does diabetes cause kidney failure will become a moot point, as it seldom develops if you make it that long.
The best prevention, of course, is to control your blood sugar, eat healthy, take any medications, and test regularly.
