High Blood Pressure and Kidneys

The kidneys are very important in controlling blood pressure of a person, and blood pressure, in turn, can affect the health of the kidneys. If you have high blood pressure, your kideys can be effected and you can have chronic kidney disease i.e CKD.

High blood pressure causes thickening of kidney vessels. If the blood vessels in the kidneys are damaged, they may stop removing wastes and extra fluid from the body. The extra fluid in the blood vessels may then raise blood pressure even more. High blood pressure is one of the leading causes of kidney failure, also called end-stage renal disease (ESRD). Every year, high blood pressure causes more than 25,000 new cases of kidney failure in the USA.

If you have Kidney disease in early stages, usually there are no symptoms. People may have CKD but not know it because they do not feel sick. A person’s glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is a measure of how well the kidneys are filtering wastes from the blood. GFR is measured by finding creatinine level in blood. The result is called eGFR, the estimated GFR.

When muscle cells are breaked a waste product is produced called as Creatinine. Healthy kidneys take creatinine out of the blood and put it into the urine to leave the body. If you have kidney disease creatinine level rises in blood as kidneys are unable to excreat this waste. An eGFR with a value below 60 milliliters per minute (mL/min) suggests some kidney damage has occurred.

You may also find Proteinuria in CKD, i.e protein in Urine. Healthy kidneys take wastes out of the blood but leave protein. Defected or diseased kidneys may fail to separate a blood protein called albumin from the wastes. In initial stages, only small amounts of albumin may leak into the urine, a condition known as microalbuminuria. As with time kidneys are more affected, the amount of albumin and other proteins in the urine increases, and the condition is called proteinuria. CKD is present when more than 30 milligrams of albumin per gram of creatinine is released in urine, with or without low eGFR.

If you have high blood pressure you are at risk of developing kidney failure. African Americans, however, are more likely than Caucasians to have high blood pressure and its related kidney problems even when their blood pressure is only mildly elevated. Studies show that African Americans are six times more likely than Caucasians to develop hypertension-related kidney failure.

If you have diabetes along with high blood pressure you are more prone to develope kidney failure. Early management of high blood pressure is especially important for African Americans with diabetes. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), also part of the NIH, sponsored the African American Study of Kidney Disease and Hypertension (AASK) to find effective ways to prevent high blood pressure and kidney failure in this population. The results, published in the November 20, 2002, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that an ACE inhibitor was the most effective drug at slowing the progression of kidney disease in African Americans. While ACE inhibitors help reduce the risk of CKD, they are less effective in decreasing blood pressure among African Americans than in Caucasians.

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