NEW YORK—Obese African-Americans may be more vulnerable to the effects of chronic kidney disease than obese whites, according to new findings from the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Early Evaluation Program (KEEP).
The study was published in the March issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases.
KEEP is a free, community-based, program that has screened more than 140,000 people across the U.S. at high risk for chronic kidney disease since its launch in 2000. In the new study, Dr. Andrew S. Bomback of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City and his colleagues looked at a subset of 37,107 obese KEEP participants (52 percent white, 48 percent black) to investigate whether there might be ethnic differences in how obesity affected kidney function.
While whites were more likely than African Americans to have components of the metabolic syndrome—a group of heart disease risk factors including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high blood glucose—black individuals were more likely to show signs of failure in kidney hormone function, Bomback and his team reported.
And while the kidneys of obese whites were more likely than those of obese blacks to show severe impairment in blood filtering capacity, blacks were more likely than whites to be excreting abnormal amounts of protein in their blood, which is a sign of ongoing kidney damage.
Bomback and his colleagues also found that among people with more advanced kidney disease, blacks were more likely than whites to have anemia and excessive secretion of parathyroid hormone, which is responsible for regulating levels of calcium in the body.
The findings might help explain why blacks and whites with chronic kidney disease have different long-term outcomes, according to Bomback and his colleagues.