One of the important parts of managing chronic kidney disease is its early identification and control. Early disease is asymptomatic, resulting in late detection. This in turn leads to irreversible damage and ultimate loss of kidney function, at which point the only treatment options (dialysis or kidney transplantation) affect individual quality of life and are inordinately expensive. For this reason, in the US, the annual cost of managing patients with chronic kidney disease amounts to 122 billion USD, 70 percent of which is accounted for by the treatment of comorbidities.1
Timely diagnosis and accurate monitoring of kidney function help avoid kidney damage but require a test capable of identifying subtle changes in kidney performance, especially when it begins to fail. Serum creatinine is currently the most commonly used screening test of kidney function in routine practice. But it is insufficiently sensitive, failing to detect early decline in a patient’s glomerular filtration rate (GFR): typically, serum creatinine levels only begin to rise once 50 percent of kidney function is lost and hence a blind area. It is estimated that half of all at-risk patients are failing to benefit from the appropriate treatment that follows accurate early diagnosis.2,3
