Department of Nephrology, PGIMER, Chandigarh had organized a patient wellbeing programme to screen for kidney disease in the morning and lectures on kidney and health were conducted in the evening during the Interactive Session at APC auditorium between 5.30 and 7 pm in the PGIMER, Chandigarh.
More than 200 people including general public and students of the nursing college and physiotherapy department attended the evening. Prof. K L Gupta, Head Dept of Nephrology, Prof. Anil Bhansali, Head Dept of Endocrinology and Dr Manish Rathi, Asstt Prof of Nephrology spoke about the problems of the chronic kidney disease, management of diabetes and hypertension and end-stage renal disease.
The lectures on Kidney diseases impressed on the facts that, chronic kidney disease has been internationally recognized as a major public health problem and is growing to become a global pandemic. There is ever increasing burden of CKD in the world. India, being one of the most populous countries in shares this burden to a large extent. With the rough estimate of 151 to 229 per million-population prevalence every year approximately 200,000 new cases of end stage renal disease are added every year. Diabetes mellitus is the most common cause of CKD in India accounting for almost one third, followed by hypertension related kidney disease, chronic glomerulonephritis and kidney disease caused by unknown aetiology. With almost 50% of the CKD (DM and hypertension related) being related to life style, adopting healthy life style modification could largely help in preventing progression of CKD.
Only 10% of the population avails adequate renal replacement therapy which includes two types, dialysis and renal transplantation. Although renal transplantation is the best and most economical long-term solution for the management of renal failure only up to 3% patents are able to get a suitable kidney donor. Others have to be maintained on hemodialysis with 2-3 exchanges per day or continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD which constitutes 20 % of patients on dialysis). Dr Nancy Sahni also spoke on the modification of diet in patients with renal disease.
Dr Ashish Sharma, Associate Prof of Renal Transplant Surgery spoke on the need of promoting the deceased (Cadaver) donor programme. With around 160,000 deaths due to accidents much of the problem of donor shortage can be taken care of if the patients and their families are motivated for donation of organs after brain-stem death. In addition the pool of live related donors could also be increased by adopting ABO-incompatible donors after desensitization or swapping between incompatible recipient-donor pairs. For this purpose the active support from the Government and NGOs is very important.
The programme concluded after the interesting question –answer session followed by closer interaction during high tea.