Catching kidney disease early

Kidneys are important organs that filter toxins and strengthen your body. Contemporary medicine has the ability to track their function over a long period of time.

However, doctors still sometimes overlook chronic kidney disease until it becomes an advanced and incredibly costly condition. If this happened to you, there might be more to the story than just a disease that is difficult to detect.

Symptoms of kidney disease

You might have no symptoms right away. In fact, most people do not feel like anything is wrong during the early stages of kidney disease. As the damage progresses, you might feel any of these common symptoms:

• Having a hard time concentrating or sleeping
• General lack of energy
• Increased need to urinate
• Appetite loss, nausea, vomiting or cramps

As you can see, many of these are also symptoms of various other health conditions. For example, they could come with aging, infections or changes in physical activity levels. However, that does not mean that doctors get a free pass when it comes to misdiagnosing this condition.

Common causes and risk factors

There are several ways that doctors might be able to narrow down the possibilities and begin to suspect that you have kidney disease. For example, they could look at some common causes.

Two common causes of kidney disease include high blood pressure and diabetes. If you had these conditions in addition to typical symptoms of kidney disease, a competent doctor would probably want to run tests. The same is true if you had other risk factors, which include certain ages, racial backgrounds and medical histories.

Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations mill patients through a system that does not take the time to analyze some of these important factors. When one of your vital organs is at stake, this is simply not acceptable.