Simple screening questionnaire for kidney disease outperforms current clinical practice ...( NEW YORK (Feb. 28 2007) -- The gener...)

NEW YORK (Feb. 28, 2007) -- The general public is not sufficiently aware that chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a serious and progressive medical condition. It remains under-diagnosed and under-treated. Understandably so, since in its early stages CKD is often asymptomatic, making individuals with the disease and their health-care providers unaware of its "silent" yet threatening presence. However, if CKD is detected and treated early, its widespread consequences -- which include kidney failure, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and even death -- may be prevented or delayed.

In a community-based study and national survey, a team of public health and medical researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill show that a simple screening questionnaire, SCreening for Occult REnal Disease (SCORED), is better able to identify patients at risk for CKD than the current National Kidney Foundation (NKF) clinical practice guidelines, the Kidney Early Evaluation Program (KEEP). The study has just been published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

SCORED demonstrates greater accuracy and greater predictive power in identifying individuals at high-risk for CKD than KEEP. In addition, SCORED defines 25 percent fewer screeners as high risk, resulting in fewer unnecessary follow-up tests.

SCORED demonstrates 88 to 95 percent sensitivity (how well the test correctly identifies people who have the disease) and a specificity of 55 to 65 percent (how well the test correctly identifies people who do not have the disease). In comparison, KEEP demonstrates a sensitivity of 86 to 92 percent and a specificity of 24 to 35 percent. Predictive values (the chance that a positive or negative test result will be correct) and the ability to distinguish CKD and non-CKD were also shown to be significantly improved using SCORED.

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