Kidney health better indicator of heart disease risk

New York, May 30: Simple parameters of the kidney's functions and damage may be better at predicting the risk of heart failure and death from heart attack and stroke than traditional tests of cholesterol levels and blood pressure, new research suggests. The data may help physicians make better decisions on whether patients need lifestyle modifications such as better diets and more exercise or treatments such as statins, medication widely used for preventing cardiovascular diseases, the study said. "Cholesterol levels and blood pressure tests are good indicators of cardiovascular risk, but they are not perfect. This study tells us we could do even better with information that often times we are already collecting," said study lead author Kunihiro Matsushita, assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The most common assessment of kidney function checks the blood for creatinine, a waste product of the muscles, and reflects how well the kidneys are filtering it out (called an estimated glomerular filtration rate, or GFR). The study was published in the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology.