Joslin Receives $24.3 Million Grant from the NIH for Diabetic Kidney Disease Study - Can kidney disease get better?

Joslin Receives $24.3 Million Grant from the NIH for Diabetic Kidney Disease Study




people with diabetes
are at great risk for end-stage renal
disease. A new research project at Joslin
Diabetes Center
funded by a $25 million dollar NIH grant
will look for new ways to prevent this
Dr. Doria: the aim is to see whether by decreasing
uric acid in people who are at risk
of kidney complications really
can slow down or even halt
their progression to chronic kidney
disease and to end stage renal
disease.
Narration: this 8 Center clinical study
will be led by joslin's doctor Alessandro Doria
and the University of Minnesota's doctor
michael Mauer
other sites include Colorado Michigan
Chicago
New York Toronto Canada and Copenhagen
Denmark
Doria: the group is actually called PERL, which is Preventing Early Renal Loss
in Diabetes. The current estimates suggest that about
10 to 15 percent of people with diabetes
develop end stage renal disease meaning
that
they need either a renal transplant or
they need hemodialysis to survive
we need additionally intervention that
acts together
with good glycemic control, trying
to cub
diabetic complications.
Narration: The three-year
trial of approximately 500 people will
test if a generic drug called
allopurinol will reduce the occurrence
of kidney disease in people with type
1 diabetes
allopurinol has already been shown to
reduce uric acid levels
and has been on the market since the
1930s as a treatment for gout
Doria: we performed a fairly large study here
at the Joslin
this was done together with
Andrzej Krolewski in the same section
where I work
and basically what we did was to follow
a group of people with type 1
diabetes for several years and what
we saw was that the levels of uric acid
at the beginning of this study were
predictive of how quickly somebody would
lose kidney function
now this an association; we don't know
whether
there is a causal link but that's why we
are doing
this study to try to see whether by
decreasing uric acid actually we can
slow down this decline kidney function
hopefully
if this is a positive, if we have positive findings we'll have a new
intervention, so we'd have a new
therapy for a kidney
complications. But also by trying to understand the mechanisms
through which this happens might give us other
targets that we could act upon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUwRaUuY_vg


Can kidney disease get better?




>> A doctor speaks with a patient in his office.
>> Can kidney disease get better?
>> The kidney damage that occurs in
chronic kidney disease is usually permanent
and tends to get worse over time.
Diabetes and high blood pressure, which are
the major causes of chronic kidney disease,
cause scarring in the kidney over time,
and as you know, scarring doesn't go away.
As a result, the kidneys don't improve.
What we aim to do with treatment is
to try to prevent further damage.
The GFR test, the blood test which measures how
well your kidneys are filtering will not get
better because the kidneys don't get better.
What we aim to do is to keep
it from getting worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2LXOW9hKDU