Pinellas News

Registry will track kidney disease in veterans

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TBO.com
Published: December 19, 2012

With more than 10,000 of the people it treats on dialysis and some 3,000 reaching end-stage kidney disease each year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has a big stake in detecting, treating and preventing renal disorders.

So the VA has given a research team at the University of Michigan the task of creating a nationwide registry that will monitor kidney disease among the U.S. veteran population.

"The registry will empower the VA to prevent kidney disease among veterans, slow its progression and potentially improve quality of life for veterans," said U-M kidney specialist Rajiv Saran, associate director of the University of Michigan Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center and principal investigator of the project.

VA officials and the U-M researchers hope the registry will make it easier for veterans to get transplants and other forms of kidney disease treatment, and improve the monitoring and control of costs related to VA renal disease care.

The $3.7 million kidney disease registry development project is being funded with a grant from the Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative.

U-M kidney specialists have worked on other disease registries, including one for the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. In creating the kidney disease registry, Saran and his colleagues will work with biostatisticians, organ transplant doctors and health policy specialists.

The U-M team will take advantage of the VA's Computerized Patient Record System. The CPRS, part of the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA, is a graphical interface health care professionals use to record the care provided at 115 VA medical centers during 5 million outpatient visits.

Treating kidney disease can be a challenge to diagnose and treat because in its early stages it produces few signs or symptoms. Often, the disease is not discovered until it is in its later stages, when treatment can be more costly and difficult and less likely to succeed.

Late-stage renal disease patients require either frequent kidney dialysis treatments or a kidney transplant.

Left untreated, kidney disease can cause a range of health problems. For example, a recent study at Temple University that included collaborators from the University of Maine and the University of Maryland found that impaired kidney function is associated with decreased thought-process functioning in areas such as global cognitive ability, abstract reasoning and verbal memory.

The Temple study concluded that the greater the kidney impairment, the greater the loss of cognitive function, particularly abstract reasoning and verbal memory.