Chronic kidney disease affects hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The condition develops when the kidneys slowly lose their ability to remove waste and extra fluid from the blood. Over time, kidney function can continue to decline, increasing the risk of kidney failure, heart disease, and early death.
Many people know that diabetes is a major cause of chronic kidney disease. However, more than half of all people living with the condition do not have diabetes.
For these patients, treatment options have been limited, making the search for new medicines especially important.
A large international clinical trial has now found that a drug called finerenone may help slow the worsening of kidney disease in people who do not have diabetes.
The research was led by Professor Hiddo Lambers Heerspink from the University Medical Center Groningen and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The FIND-CKD study included 1,584 adults with chronic kidney disease. Every participant had reduced kidney function and high levels of protein in the urine, an early warning sign that kidney damage is becoming worse.
The volunteers were randomly assigned to receive either finerenone or a placebo every day. Everyone also continued taking standard kidney medicines known as ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers, which are commonly used to protect kidney function.
The researchers followed the participants for just over three years. They regularly measured kidney function using estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR, which shows how well the kidneys filter waste from the blood.
The results showed that people taking finerenone lost kidney function more slowly than those taking the placebo. The researchers said the improvement was large enough to be important in everyday medical practice, not just statistically significant.
The medicine also reduced the risk of serious health problems. Major kidney events, hospital admissions for heart failure, and deaths from cardiovascular disease occurred in 13.9% of people taking finerenone compared with 16.9% in the placebo group, reducing the overall risk by about 23%.
Another important finding involved protein in the urine. On average, protein levels fell by more than 41% in people taking finerenone, compared with about 9% in the placebo group. More than half of the patients taking the drug achieved at least a 30% reduction, which is considered a good sign for long-term kidney health.
The researchers also found that finerenone was generally safe throughout the study. Because the medicine had already shown benefits for people with diabetic kidney disease, these new findings greatly expand the number of patients who may benefit from it.
This was a large, well-designed international trial published in one of the world’s leading medical journals, making the findings particularly convincing. However, doctors will still need to consider each patient’s overall health before prescribing the medicine.
Overall, the study suggests finerenone could become an important new treatment for many people with chronic kidney disease who do not have diabetes, helping preserve kidney function and lowering the risk of serious kidney and heart complications.
If you care about diabetes, please read studies about high vitamin D level linked to lower dementia risk in type 2 diabetes, and this eating habit could help reduce risk of type 2 diabetes.
For more information about nutrition, please see recent studies about unhealthy plant-based diets linked to metabolic syndrome, and results showing Mediterranean diet could help reduce the diabetes risk by 30%.
Source: University Medical Center Groningen.
