Silent kidney damage found in COVID survivors: Study

A study has revealed that silent kidney damage is the latest ailment to be identified in some of the COVID-19 survivors, reports Bloomberg.

According to the study, there have been reports of people, who recover from the coronavirus at home, suffering injury to the blood-filtering organ and escalates with the severity of COVID. Even non-hospitalised patients with no renal problems have almost a twofold higher risk of developing end-stage kidney disease, compared with someone who never had COVID.

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The findings were reported in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology on Wednesday. It highlights yet another pernicious burden of the pandemic that’s sickened more than 200 million people globally.

According to the data, 7.8 extra people needing dialysis or a kidney transplant per 10,000 of these were mild-to-moderate COVID patients.

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Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the clinical epidemiology center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri, said the data shows that the number is not a small number and when you multiply by the huge number of Americans and also globally who might be ending up with end-stage kidney disease. “This is really huge, and it will literally shape our lives for probably the next decade or more.”

Al-Aly led the study with his colleagues in April. He mined the data collected during the routine delivery of care from the Veterans Health Administration to document the cascade of debilitating effects that plague COVID survivors months after diagnosis.

Al-Aly’s latest research 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,” said Al-Aly, who also works as a nephrologist.

Al-Aly and colleagues found non-hospitalised 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.

Doctors caring for COVID survivors must also be alert for a broad spectrum of kidney disease among these patients, according to Al-Aly.

“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.