Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash
Kidneys are vital to your overall health and World Kidney Day aims to raise awareness of the importance of our kidneys and the suffering caused when they don’t work as well as they should do.
You might wonder why your kidneys are vital to your body and World Kidney Day has pulled together some useful facts:
What do your kidneys do?
- Kidneys clean your blood 40 times every day – that’s 180 litres!
- Kidneys remove toxins, excess water, and waste products to make urine
- Kidneys play a vital role in regulating your blood pressure
- Kidneys activate Vitamin D to keep your bones and muscles in good shape
- Kidneys are essential for a healthy body
What work is Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust doing for patients with kidney (renal) conditions?
Main Renal Centre
The regional Renal Centre at Preston for Lancashire Teaching Hospitals provides treatment and care for patients across Lancashire and South Cumbria who have kidney (renal) conditions such as renal failure, vasculitis, nephrotic syndrome, and anaemia. The centre has a high dependency care unit for patients with single organ failure and provides vascular surgery, interventional radiology, renal biopsy, plasma exchange, immunosuppressive therapy, and dialysis.
Ulverston Renal centre
Building works are underway at the site of a new centre in Ulverston for people being treated for kidney disease, due to open in July.
The new centre will provide haemodialysis treatment and outpatient clinics. Haemodialysis is a treatment to remove waste products and extra fluid from the blood and is given to patients whose kidneys have stopped working properly.
More detail on the improvements which are being overseen by our Trust can be read here.
Clinical Research Facility
We have a specialist renal research team at our NIHR Lancashire Clinical Research Facility – where specialist research teams carry out work to help offer patients and their families the high quality of care they deserve; often finding new treatments.
While the pandemic put a stop to a lot of research, the Trust has been involved in several renal research projects which we have highlighted below.
RaDaR
Around 800 of our patients signed up to RaDaR – the rare disease registry. It was set up by the Renal Association to provide patient and clinical information about 27 different rare renal conditions and link participating patients with their local hospital research team.
BISTRO-Study
BISTRO a randomised controlled trial, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), to determine if incorporation of bioimpedance into the setting of the post dialytic weight reduces loss of residual kidney function in incident centre-based Haemodialysis (HD) patients, with the potential to improve clinical outcomes in particular dialysis related symptoms, hospitalisation and survival.
STOP-ACEI Trial
This was a national multi-centre randomised controlled trial to test the hypothesis that stopping treatment with ACEi (Angiotensin-coverting-enzymes), or ARBs (Angiotensin receptor blockers), or a combination of both of these blood and heart-related medications, compared with continuing on these treatments, improves or stabilises renal function in patients with progressive stage 4 or 5 Chronic Kidney Disease. (CKD)
Our research team is also working closely with the Leicester Kidney Lifestyle Team, a multidisciplinary research group, which works collaboratively with healthcare professionals to produce high-quality research to help patients achieve the possible health and wellbeing outcomes.
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