VIDEO: Screening patients for CKD

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Yeah, so CKD, or chronic kidney disease, screening really is based on blood work. A blood test that we use called creatinine, it's sort of our surrogate marker for kidney function. It's a substance sort of produced by muscle and then excreted by the kidney. And the higher that number on the lab test basically indicates that the filtration function of the kidney isn't quite normal. And really the blood test is the major screening mechanism. But the thing to remember is that the term chronic kidney disease applies to a very broad range of people.

We talked about that, creatinine. That's sort of a marker of actual kidney filtration. But patients who have chronic kidney disease also may just have blood in the urine or may just have protein in the urine, or may actually have structural issues of the kidneys, such as polycystic kidney disease. So the screening process really relies on an evaluation of that creatinine, which is a blood test, and urinalyses looking, again, for blood and protein, and those markers, like I said, for any indication that the kidneys aren't quite as they should be.