A study published next week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine suggests that elderly people with damaged kidneys are at greater risk of cardiovascular disease, such as heart failure and stroke, and other causes of mortality.
The findings indicate that greater efforts should be made to encourage elderly people who have impaired kidney function alongside other risk factors—such as high blood cholesterol and high blood pressure, which are often a result of smoking and diet—to make lifestyle changes to avoid developing cardiovascular problems.
Most countries face increasing rates of cardiovascular disease and it is the single leading cause of death in the United States and many European countries. It has already been established that young and middle-aged people with a reduced estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR)—the measurement of the movement of waste and excess fluid through the kidneys—are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those with healthy kidneys. To establish how at risk elderly people with impaired kidney function were, Ian Ford of the University of Glasgow and colleagues analysed existing data from a three year clinical trial conducted among men and women aged between 70 and 82 in Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands.