Covid 19 pandemic has directly or indirectly affected the whole population within less than two years of spread, however, the side effects of viral infection have not yet been completely unraveled. A recent study conducted at United States has proven that Covid survivors are at increased risk for acute kidney injury, that hails in these people, without even being noticed by patients.
According to the study, there are high chances that injury to the blood-filtering organ can occur among people who are recovering from the coronavirus at home, and this intensifies with the severity of Covid. Even non-hospitalized patients with no showing renal problems have almost a twofold higher risk of developing end-stage kidney disease, compared to someone who never had Covid.
The findings, reported Wednesday in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, also highlights yet another malicious burden of the pandemic that has affected more than 200 million people globally. The data shows 7.8 extra people needing dialysis or kidney transplant per 10,000 of these mild-to-moderate Covid-19 patients.
‘This is not a small number, if you multiply by the huge number of Americans and also globally who might be ending up with end-stage kidney disease’: informed Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the clinical epidemiology centre at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri. “This is really huge, and it will literally shape our lives for probably the next decade or more”: He added.
Al-Aly, the master brain behind the study, and his colleagues in April collected data during the routine delivery of care from the Veterans Health Administration to document the cascade of debilitating effects that affect Covid survivors months after diagnosis, including blood clots, stroke, diabetes and breathing difficulties to heart, liver and kidney damage, depression, anxiety and memory loss.
Al-Aly’s newest study compared the risks of kidney-related conditions in 89,216 VA users who survived Covid against more than 1.7 million counterparts without the pandemic disease. ‘What’s really problematic about kidney disease is that it’s really silent, that it doesn’t really manifest in pain or any other symptoms,’ Al-Aly explained.
Al-Aly and colleagues found non-hospitalized Covid patients have a 23% increased risk of suffering acute kidney injury within six months — a condition that impedes the removal of waste and toxins from the blood.
Aly, who is also working as a nephrologist warns doctors caring for Covid survivors to be alert for a wider spectrum of kidney disease among these patients. ‘If this is really happening at a wider scale — and we think it is — it’s just a matter of time before we see all of these people hitting the clinics, needing dialysis, needing transplantation that places a lot of burden on the patient himself or herself, and really is very costly to the health care system,’ he said.
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