ALBERTA, Canada—About one in 40 men and one in 60 women in middle age have a high risk of developing end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in their lifetimes, reported MedPage Today.
In a large pofpulation-based cohort study, the lifetime risk of ESRD for men at age 40 was 2.66 percent, according to Brenda Hemmelgarn, MD, PhD, of Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, and colleagues.
That was slightly higher than the 1.76 percent observed for 40-year-old women, Hemmelgarn and colleagues reported online in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
ESRD has both significant health consequences and requires high-cost treatments so good estimates of the lifetime risk would be of value for the public and for health policy makers, the researchers noted.
Hemmelgarn and colleagues studied the incidence of ESRD over an 11-year period in the Western Canadian province of Alberta.
The primary cohort included 1,459,937 men and 1,435,584 women, 18 or older, who had public health insurance in Alberta from April 1, 1997 to March 31, 2008. Alberta's health insurance covers more than 99 percent of the province's residents, the researchers noted. Participants were free of ESRD at the start of the study.
A subgroup of men and women who had an outpatient creatinine measurement from May 1, 2002 to March 31, 2008 were used to estimate lifetime ESRD risk by level of kidney function.
