A 30 percent increase in chronic kidney disease over the past decade has prompted the U.S. Renal Data System (USRDS) to issue for the first time a separate report documenting the magnitude of the disease, which affects an estimated 27 million Americans and accounts for more than 24 percent of Medicare costs.

Healthy individuals who gain weight, even to a weight still considered normal, are at risk for developing chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a study appearing in the September 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN).

For patients with type 2 diabetes, a condition called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) may be an important risk factor for diabetes-related chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a study in the August Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN).

Black patients are more likely to die in the early stages of chronic kidney disease than whites, according to a new study by a Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) researcher and his team that will be published in the July issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

For patients with moderate to severe chronic kidney disease (CKD), treatment with activated vitamin D may reduce the risk of death by approximately one-fourth, suggests a study in the August Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

The best available treatment for chronic kidney disease from high blood pressure did not keep the disease from substantially worsening in about a fourth of African-Americans studied, according to long-term results of a National Institutes of Health study published April 28, 2008, in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The estimated 19 million Americans living with chronic kidney disease (CKD) face a high risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Recent studies have shown that a main source of this cardiovascular risk is CKD patients' high levels of blood phosphate.

The general public is not sufficiently aware that chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a serious and progressive medical condition. It remains under-diagnosed and under-treated. Understandably so, since in its early stages CKD is often asymptomatic, making individuals with the disease and their health-care providers unaware of its "silent" yet threatening presence.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered how low-oxygen conditions can worsen chronic kidney disease (CKD).

A new study confirms that chronic kidney disease (CKD) increases the already-high risk of serious cardiovascular events in diabetic patients with damage to the large blood vessels and suggests that treatment with the anti-diabetic drug pioglitazone may help to lower this risk, reports the January Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee have found that the risk of radiation injury in normal tissue after exposure may be reduced by a drug in common use. Their study in press appears in the on line issue of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology and Physics.

A growing number of Americans have chronic kidney disease, but most remain unaware of it, hampering efforts to prevent irreversible kidney failure requiring dialysis or a transplant, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published November 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.