In a recent study, it has been found that Kidneydamage is painless and silent, and it is the latest disease to be identifiedthat afflicts a large swath of Covid-19 survivors.
Injuries to the blood-filtering organ canoccur in people recovering from the coronavirus at home and worsen with the severityof Covid, study finds. Even outpatients without kidney problems are almosttwice as likely to develop end stage kidney disease, compared to someone whohas never had Covid.
The findings, reported Wednesday in theJournal of the American Society of Nephrology, highlight another perniciousburden of the pandemic that has sickened more than 200 million peopleworldwide.
Data shows an additional 7.8 people needdialysis or kidney transplant per 10,000 of these mild to moderate Covidpatients.
“It’s not a small number, if you multiply bythe large number of Americans and also around the world who could end up withend-stage kidney disease,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the center. ClinicalEpidemiology of the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri.“It’s really huge, and it’s going to literally shape our lives for probably thenext decade or more.”
Al-Aly’s latest research compared the risksof kidney-related conditions in 89,216 VA users who survived Covid against morethan 1.7 million counterparts without the pandemic disease.
“What’s really problematic about kidneydisease is that it’s really silent, that it doesn’t really manifest in pain orany other symptoms,” said Al-Aly, who also works as a nephrologist.
Al-Aly and colleagues found non-hospitalizedCovid patients have a 23% increased risk of suffering acute kidney injurywithin six months — a condition that impedes the removal of waste and toxinsfrom the blood.
Doctors caring for Covid survivors must alsobe alert for a broad spectrum of kidney disease among these patients, accordingto Al-Aly.
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“If this is really happening at a wider scale— and we think it is — it’s just a matter of time before we see all of thesepeople hitting the clinics, needing dialysis, needing transplantation thatplaces a lot of burden on the patient himself or herself, and really is verycostly to the health care system,” he said.