Approximately one in seven adults in the United States has kidney disease, where the organs responsible for filtering waste and excess water from the blood are damaged, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over time, this condition can lead to kidney failure, heart attack and stroke. But as many as 90% of people with chronic kidney disease don't know that they have the condition because there are often no symptoms during the early stages of the disease.
"Most people aren't diagnosed until the disease has progressed to an advanced stage. We need a better way to predict who is at risk, who is more likely to develop kidney disease so that we can detect and intervene earlier," said Djibril Ba, assistant professor of public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine.
Now, Ba and a team of researchers from Penn State College of Medicine, have found that previous COVID-19 infection is a significant risk factor for kidney disease. Specifically, compared to influenza, those with a history of COVID-19 infection have a 2.3-times higher risk of acute kidney injury and a 1.4-times higher risk of chronic kidney disease, according to an analysis of over three million patients available online now ahead of publication in the journal Communications Medicine. They are also 4.7 times more likely to experience kidney failure.
