Routine screening for kidney disease would be cost-effective, study argues
With more effective treatments available, a study finds that screening all Americans for chronic kidney disease could keep hundreds of thousands from needing dialysis some day.
In 2012, the United States Preventive Services Task Force convened to determine whether it should recommend kidney disease screening for all Americans. Advocates had been pushing for it, citing ballooning rates of chronic kidney disease. But at the time, the group found there wasn’t enough evidence to say if screening was a net good.
That paradigm has since shifted, says Marika Cusick, a Ph.D. candidate in health policy at Stanford. The entry of new drugs, sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors that have shown efficacy in clinical trials, has made national kidney disease screening cost-effective, she says. Her findings were reported in a study published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
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