February
14, 2008 Over 100 mn Indians
Suffer from Kidney Problem: AIIMS
New Delhi
One out of every 10 Indians - that is 100 million from among over a
billion Indians - suffers from some form of kidney disease,
according to an expert from the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences (AIIMS).
The country's top government hospital here is to organise a national
convention on preventing kidney disease from Feb 16. Chief Justice
of India K.G. Balakrishnan wil inaugurate it.
"Kidney diseases and kidney failures are alarmingly increasing
worldwide, including in India. In India one out of 10 persons has
some form of chronic kidney disease," Y.K. Gupta, a professor of
pharmacology at AIIMS, said Thursday.
Chronic kidney disease is a broad term that includes various degrees
of kidney damage - from stage one to stage five, the latter is also
known as end-stage kidney disease which requires either dialysis or
kidney transplant.
Worldwide over 1.5 million people, including tens of thousands of
Indians, continue to live on dialysis and with kidney transplants.
Doctors said prevention of kidney diseases is a major challenge for
both authorities and medical practitioners across India in 21st
century.
"Diabetes and hypertension are responsible for more than 60 percent
of chronic kidney disease (CKD) cases. Nearly 15 percent of adults
in urban India are diabetic and 40 percent of them are likely to
develop kidney problems," Gupta said.
Doctors said about 20 percent of the adult Indians are hyper-tensive
and many of them will develop CKD. Many CKD patients also die of
cardiovascular complications.
AIIMS authorities said every year over 150,000 new patients of
stage-five CKD require dialysis or kidney transplant.
"But less than 10 percent are able to get some form of these
treatment and rest die without getting any definite treatment,"
Gupta added.
High costs and non-availability of kidney donors are major
limitations in successful treatment of chronic kidney disease.
Because of this, people resort to even illegal means to get kidney
transplant.
The police from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh last month unearthed an
illegal kidney transplant racket worth billions of dollars, going on
for about a decade. It involved obtaining kidneys illegally from
poor labourers, often under force, and transplanting them to
patients from many countries like Canada, Greece, the US and Turkey.
The kingpin of the racket, Amit Kumar, was arrested last week from a
resort house in Nepal.
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