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Kidney failure in the country - Zamboanga Today Online

At least one Filipino dies every hour from kidney failure which ranks as the 9th leading cause of death among Filipinos.

Dr. Aileen Javier, executive director of the National Kidney and Transplant Institute (NKTI), a government tertiary specialty center for patients with kidney diseases for the past 30 years,said people with kidney failure need to undergo dialysis or renal replacement therapy, or kidney transplantation, otherwise they will surely die.

"Each year an estimated 120 Filipinos per million population (PMP) develop kidney failure or about 10,000 needed kidney replacement each year, rising 10 percent annually, said Javier during a media forum last Friday sponsored by the Philippine Information Agency in Quezon City.

The forum is part of the month-long celebration campaign or Kidney Month to raise public awareness and the importance of kidney care,with this year's theme "Ikaw at Ako, Panalo sa Malusog na Bato".

"Unfortunately, in 2010 only 9,765 patients who were diagnosed with kidney failure received treatment by either starting dialysis (n=9716) or received kidney transplant (n=49) without going through dialysis", said Javier.

In 2010, about 11,280 patients were expected to start dialysis but based on a report from the Philippine Renal Disease Registry Annual Report for 2011, only 9,765 received treatment, thus, 14 percent or 1,579 patients newly diagnosed with end stage renal disease just died without receiving any treatment in 2010, she said.

"How many of you have diabetes and high blood pressure or have relatives who do? You are at risk for the development of kidney disease," Javier said, noting leading cause of kidney failure in the country is diabetes (44.6 percent), followed by high blood pressure (23.6 percent), and inflammation of kidneys (19.3 percent).

Javier said these patients were primarily between the ages of 51 to 60 years in a quarter of patients, followed by ages 61 to 70 years in 22 percent of cases.

On renal care prevention and health care, Javier encourages people to have a regular urinalysis check-up noting that the disease is really treacherous that "you can go around not knowing that you have disease," she said.

And most important for people is simple lifestyle which include: limiting salt in diet, drinking plenty of water, maintaining normal weight, and exercising daily for 30 minutes to keep the kidneys in good condition.

"A good diet na hindi siya masyadong fatty at salty kase it can lead to high cholesterol and to hypertension, Javier said, adding people should also "avoid masyadong sugary diets kasama na rin iyong kulang daw tayo sa physical activity".

"Kulang tayo ng exercise, and of course we need to drink lots of water kase we get dehydrated, and sometimes our diet can have too much salt,and very often you end up with renal stone," Javier explained.

She noted likewise that the NKTI is the forefront in leading the nation's healthcare for patients with kidney and urologic diseases, kidney failure and kidney transplantation, with the institute performing about 300 kidney transplants each year.

Asked on the cost of kidney transplantation in the country, Javier estimated about P600,000 up to one million pesos, and usually done with a donor from the patient's family.

"It is accepted that kidney transplation is the best treatment for kidney failure because it provides the longest survival and the best quality of life," said Javier.

But while transplantation is the best treatment for the disease, only 500 Filipinos received kidney transplant each year,"Javier said.

by: PNA


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Salt intake skepticism in the Sunday New York Times.
NY Times: The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.

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'Monetary dialysis' has proven to be much more effective in re-starting ... - Interest.co.nz

By Raf Manji*

Quantitative Easing (QE) first entered popular language during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

Central banks, specifically the US Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Bank of England (BoE), tried to provide stimulus to their economies by buying government and corporate securities from banks.

The goal was to free up monetary conditions and, thereby, to induce an increase in lending and, as a result, new economic activity.

As interest rates fell to zero, the Fed began QE1 in November 2008 with a $600 billion purchase of Mortgage-backed securities (MBS). It did this by creating new credit in its own account and then exchanging this for the MBS held by the banks.

The purpose of this was threefold: to improve bank balance sheets, raise the price of securities (and therefore reduce interest rates along the yield curve) and stimulate new borrowing. This was not an entirely new policy, as Japan had been engaged in the same process for over 10 years, though with limited success. The Bank of England followed suit in March 2009 and started buying UK Government bonds and a limited amount of other high-grade assets.

The initial impact was felt in the asset markets with the price of stocks, bonds and commodities all rising.

In fact, rising commodity prices were seen as an unwelcome side effect of QE, given that QE was supposed to boost lending and, therefore, economic activity - more specifically, new jobs. Banks were supposed to be lending these excess reserves, not speculating in financial markets.

The reality was that banks had no interest in lending and businesses and consumers had little interest in borrowing.

The central bankers had failed to note that they were in the middle of a huge debt bubble and that offering new debt into a market saturated with the stuff was hardly going to be a winner.

There is no doubt QE helped restore confidence to the financial markets and, as a side effect, helped steady the general economy. Whether it actually worked in the manner it was supposed to, is highly debatable. As Bank of England Governor Mervyn King stated when giving evidence to the UK Treasury Committee on QE,

“I can’t guarantee that it (QE) means that bank lending will rise, but what I do believe is that it won’t fall as far as it might otherwise have done”.

In terms of impact, the US bailout of the auto industry had more success with over 1 million jobs saved. Whilst the financing aspects were contentious, the outcome has been positive. As Obama aides noted, direct government funding enabled the auto industry to survive and this would not have happened if it had been left to the market. Setting aside the merits of saving the US auto industry, what was crucial and different about this policy was that it involved spending direct stimulus into the real economy, where people are employed to make products.

As Nouriel Roubini noted, the US Government would have been better off just spending the new credit used for QE directly into the economy. He suggested in a co-authored 2011 paper that there should be a massive infrastructure rebuild ($1.2 trillion) in the US, which would create jobs and lay the foundation for “a more efficient and cost-effective economy”. He further noted that the crisis had been exacerbated by “inadequate action” by policymakers who had an “inadequate understanding of what ails us”.  

It’s clear that policymakers have not stepped back and tried to understand both the causes and outcomes of the crisis. In a debt deflating system, no amount of new debt is going to help the problem. Until the bad debt has been cleared, new investment is unlikely to happen and the economy dies a slow death. One option that hasn’t been considered, as Roubini alludes to, is to actually stimulate the real economy directly i.e. the economy that produces real goods and services. Governments can actually print new money and spend it directly into the economy through infrastructure projects. That way the money directly enters the economy and supports real economic activity, in a way that QE was supposed to do but never did.

The Sustento Institute actually proposed this type of policy in 2011, immediately after the devastating February 22nd Christchurch Earthquake.

A direct injection of $5 billion of new money was suggested as a way of financing new and necessary infrastructure for the rebuild of the city. At that time, this was calculated to save around $200 million a year in financing costs and avoid further increases in government debt.

Ironically, the Minister of Finance rejected this, on the grounds that it may cause “an adverse combination of high inflation, arbitrary wealth transfers and a loss of confidence in the creditworthiness of New Zealand”.

This response supports Roubini’s position that policymakers simply do not understand the problem. In the case of New Zealand, the Minister of Finance seems to be quite happy to keep borrowing money and worsening the financial position of the country.

As has been seen, inflation is non-existent in a debt deflating economy.

Of course, any new injections of new money must be carefully monitored and be at a level which is not likely to cause over stimulation of the economy. As Willem Buiter, a former external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee notes, an injection of base money “even in huge amounts, need not become inflationary ever”. Buiter goes on to state that “any inflationary increase impact of the enlarged stock of base money on the stock of bank credit or broad money can be neutralised by either raising bank reserve requirements, or by raising the remuneration rate on excess reserves held by banks” .

Thus, inflationary concerns can be set aside when this double-sided process is undertaken. This type of intervention has been called 'Monetary Dialysis' , where clean money comes into the system (newly minted e-notes) and replaces or causes a reduction in debt money (bank credit) in order to keep the money supply at a prescribed level.

In this process, all the objections raised by the Minister of Finance are dealt with. Infrastructure is rebuilt, people are employed, goods and services are provided, inflation is stable and money is saved, as there are no financing costs incurred. As to the creditworthiness of New Zealand, it is more likely that this will improve as debt falls and the productive economy recovers.

What’s not to like about that?

----------------------------------------------------

Raf Manji heads the Sustento Institute, a think tank based in Christchurch

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New biomarkers, therapeutic targets for kidney cancer - HealthCanal.com

SACRAMENTO — Using blood, urine and tissue analysis of a unique mouse model, a team led by UC Davis researchers has identified several proteins as diagnostic biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets for kidney cancer. Subject to follow-up validation testing, inhibition of these proteins and several related pathways holds promise as a form of therapy to slow the growth of kidney tumors.

In a paper just published online in the journal Cancer Research, the researchers found high concentrations of specific proteins that point to alterations in three sequences of chemical reactions known as biochemical pathways of mice implanted with human kidney cancer cells. The findings suggest that cancerous tumors modulate the pathways, which in turn makes these pathways potential therapeutic targets.

Nicotinamide and cinnamoylglycine, which were altered as a signature of one of the pathways, are just two of approximately 2,000 chemicals, or metabolites, that the human body produces. Metabolites, referring to any substance produced by metabolism, are a reflection of the body's processes in real time. The field of study, known as metabolomics, enables researchers to discover biomarkers and to identify novel therapeutic targets.

The study used metabolomics techniques and instrumentation to simultaneously examine chemicals in two biofluids (urine and serum, or blood) as well as tissue from kidney cancer mice models. Seeking to describe the utility of these fluids as tumor indicators, they found that serum metabolomics analysis is the most accurate proxy of chemical changes that are related to kidney cancer.

"It's exciting to report that our identification of several important metabolic processes may well result in the discovery of diagnostic markers and new therapeutic targets for kidney cancers," said lead author Robert H. Weiss, a professor in the UC Davis Division of Nephrology, Department of Internal Medicine. Currently, there are no tests to easily identify kidney cancer and current treatments are not always successful, so these markers will be important tools for detection and new treatments of the disease.

For the study, researchers transplanted human kidney cancer cells into a mouse model capable of growing human tumors.  Researchers compared the metabolites identified in the implanted mice against those in a control group of mice that had surgery, but no cancer cells implanted. 

If further research with mouse models demonstrates that inhibition of the newly identified targets works in therapy, then preparation for human trials will be a next step.

"This research represents collaboration among many kinds of experts, all of whom are concerned that kidney cancer patients have too few treatment options, which often have debilitating side effects," said Weiss, who serves as chief of nephrology at the Sacramento Veterans' Administration Medical Center in addition to his work at UC Davis.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Medical Service of the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs, grants 1R01CA135401-01A1 and 1R01DK082690-01A1. Other UC Davis authors were Sheila Ganti and Omran Abu Aboud of the Department of Internal Medicine, Sandra L. Taylor and Kyoungmi Kim of the Department of Public Health Sciences, Joy Yang of the Department of Urology, and Christopher Evans of the Comprehensive Cancer Center and Department of Urology. Authors also included Michael V. Osier of the Rochester Institute of Technology and Danny C. Alexander of Metabolon in Durham, N.C.

UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center
UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center is the only National Cancer Institute-designated center serving the Central Valley and inland Northern California, a region of more than 6 million people. Its specialists provide compassionate, comprehensive care for more than 9,000 adults and children every year, and access to more than 150 clinical trials at any given time. Its innovative research program engages more than 280 scientists at UC Davis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Jackson Laboratory (JAX West), whose scientific partnerships advance discovery of new tools to diagnose and treat cancer. Through the Cancer Care Network, UC Davis collaborates with a number of hospitals and clinical centers throughout the Central Valley and Northern California regions to offer the latest cancer care. Its community-based outreach and education programs address disparities in cancer outcomes across diverse populations. For more information, visit cancer.ucdavis.edu.

Contact: Dorsey Griffith
Phone: 916-734-9118
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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Vitamin D or D2 and erythropoietin for hemodialysis patients - Teatro Naturale
Teatro Naturale
An interventional study is being conducted by Dialysis Clinic, Inc. to determine the safety and effect of some supplementation by SC An interventional study is being conducted by Dialysis Clinic, Inc. (DCI) to determine the safety and effect of

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