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Heart health relies on kidneys

Kidney disease accelerates heart disease, and the reverse is often true.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 26, 2007

WASHINGTON - Hearts and kidneys: If one's diseased, better keep a close eye on the other.

Surprising research shows kidney disease somehow speeds up heart disease well before it has ravaged the kidneys. And perhaps not so surprising, doctors have proved that heart disease can trigger kidney destruction, too.

The work, from two studies involving more than 50, 000 patients, promises to boost efforts to diagnose simmering kidney disease earlier. All it takes are urine and blood tests that cost less than $25, something proponents want to become as routine as cholesterol checks.

"The average patient knows their cholesterol, " says Dr. Peter McCullough, preventive medicine chief at Michigan's William Beaumont Hospital. "The average patient has no idea of their kidney function."

Chronic kidney disease, or CKD, is a quiet epidemic: Many of the 19-million Americans estimated to have it don't know they do. The kidneys lose their ability to filter waste out of the bloodstream so slowly that symptoms aren't obvious until the organs are damaged. End-stage kidney failure is rising fast, with 400, 000 people requiring dialysis or a transplant to survive, a toll that has doubled in each of the past two decades.

And while CKD patients often are terrified of dialysis, most will die of heart disease before their kidneys disintegrate to that point, something that kidney specialists have recognized for years but isn't widely known.

The new research is highlighted in this month's Archives of Internal Medicine with a call for doctors who care for heart patients to start rigorously checking out the kidneys.

The link sounds logical. After all, high blood pressure and diabetes are chief risk factors for both chronic kidney disease and heart attacks.

But the link goes beyond those risk factors, stresses McCullough: Once the kidneys begin to fail, something accelerates heart disease, not just in the obviously sick or very old, but at what he calls "a shockingly early age."

McCullough and colleagues tracked more than 37, 000 relatively young people - average age 53 - who volunteered for a kidney screening. Three markers of kidney function were checked: the rate at which kidneys filter blood, called the GFR, or glomerular filtration rate; levels of the protein albumin in the urine; and whether they were anemic.

The odds of having heart disease rose steadily as each of the kidney markers worsened. And those who had both CKD and known heart disease had a threefold increased risk of death in 2 1/2 years, mostly from heart problems.

Meanwhile, researchers at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston evaluated more than 13, 000 people who had participated in two large heart-health studies. People diagnosed with heart disease at the studies' start had twice the risk of declining kidney function in the next nine years.

That makes sense. Heart disease narrows arteries all over the body. Also, some heart imaging tests use compounds that may harm kidneys.

But McCullough suspects a more complex culprit: Both the heart and kidneys send various signals to the bone marrow, which produces a type of stem cell that keeps those organs in good repair. When either starts to fail, this key repair mechanism falters, too, he explains.

Fast Facts:

What to watch for

- Heart disease patients should be carefully monitored for declining kidney function.

- Anyone with kidney risk factors - a relative with kidney disease, or someone with diabetes, high blood pressure or a relative with either - should get his or her kidney filtration rate, or GFR, tested. A normal GFR is 120. Below 60 indicates kidney disease.

- Kidney patients should closely monitor heart-related functions. Systolic blood pressure - the top number - should never be above 130, and the so-called bad or LDL cholesterol should be below 70.

[Last modified June 26, 2007, 00:31:13]