Chronic Kidney Disease: What’s the Big Deal About This Illness?

Chronic kidney disease is on the rise in Singapore, and this is a worrying trend.

A person is diagnosed with chronic kidney disease when he/she has kidney disease for over 3 months.

This disease involves a gradual loss of kidney function, with advanced stages posing a dangerous risk by causing hazardous levels of waste, fluid and electrolyte buildup in your body.

You may not realise that you have this disease when it’s in the early stages, but it can advance to end-stage kidney failure if you fail to stop it from progressing.
What Are the 3 Common Causes of Chronic Kidney Disease?

In Singapore, the most common causes of this disease are hypertension, diabetes, or both.

These conditions occur frequently here, with a number of studies indicating that 2 out of 3 Singaporeans are at risk of having chronic kidney disease.
High Blood Pressure

Your kidneys filter out waste and fluids from your blood, and this process requires plenty of blood vessels.

When the vessels are damaged, the functional part of your kidney don’t get enough oxygen and nutrients required to function properly.

As time passes, high blood pressure left uncontrolled can narrow, harden, and weaken the arteries around the kidneys. As a result, they cannot pass on sufficient blood to kidney tissues.

Type 1 or 2 Diabetes

Diabetes damages your kidneys. It harms the small blood vessels in your kidneys by narrowing and blocking them.

As a result, the blood flow becomes insufficient, hurts the kidneys, and causes a type of protein to end up in the urine where it’s not supposed to be.

It can also damage your body’s nerves and result in a full bladder, damaging your kidneys. Urine that stays in your bladder for a long time can also cause a bacterial infection that may spread to your kidneys.

Kidney Inflammation

Kidney inflammation happens when your kidneys become inflamed suddenly. If left untreated, it can progress to kidney failure.

There are a few types of kidney inflammation:

Interstitial nephritis
Pyelonephritis
Glomerulonephritis
How Long Can You Live With Chronic Kidney Disease?

Stage 5, or end-stage chronic kidney disease, is the point where your kidneys are about to fail, or already have.

Whent this happens, here are the effects:

Failure to regulate blood pressure
Failure to trigger Vitamin D
Failure to remove bodily waste
Failure to produce the hormone that helps to make red blood cells

If you start dialysis treatment, the life expectancy is about 5 to 10 years, but many patients have continued to live for up to 30 years.

On the other hand, if you are lucky to get a new kidney, you may live for another 12 to 20 years for a living donor, and 8 to 12 years for a deceased donor’s kidney.

Going without any treatment will not improve your condition, and it is hard to determine the exact number of years you can live because of different factors.
Can You Overcome Chronic Kidney Disease?

Unfortunately, chronic kidney disease usually has no cure, even though some kinds of kidney disease can be treated.

Treatment to help involves ways to control symptoms, cut down on possible complications, and slow down the disease’s advancement.

It is advised to change up your lifestyle, including what you eat, the amount of exercise you do, and staying away from smoking and drinking.

A house call doctor can help you manage your chronic condition by assessing your diet and lifestyle before making a long-term plan. You can easily find a house doctor in Singapore!