What is the burden of CKD and cardiovascular disease on life expectancy and health service utilization in Hong Kong Chinese hypertensive patients?
In hypertensive patients, severe CKD carries a higher mortality and cost burden than combined heart disease and stroke, highlighting the critical need for CKD prevention.
This study demonstrated extremely high mortality risk and medical cost increases for severe CKD, exceeding the combined effects from heart disease and stroke. Mortality risks and costs for moderate CKD, heart disease, and stroke were similar individually and roughly multiplicative for any combination. These findings suggest that to reduce mortality and health care costs in patients with hypertension, CKD prevention and intervention merits priority equal to that of cardiovascular disease.
Wan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.