Here’s a roundup of nephrology news over the past couple weeks. Click on the headlines to browse the articles. Or, if you’ve discovered other newsworthy items that may be of interest to our team or your nephrologist peers, we invite you to please share news links in the comments.
As tech companies move into health care, here’s what to watch in 2019
From Amazon and Apple opening clinics to Uber launching a medical transit program, technology giants spent 2018 moving into the health care space. Many of these initiatives are still in very early stages, but they’ll continue to grow in 2019, and some of them may have an impact on Americans’ health care experiences as soon as this year.
Against the odds, tiny Waltham biotech strives to improve dialysis patients’ lives
As the world’s leading biotech executives descended on the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week to talk about gene editing, precision medicine, and other cutting-edge treatments, the folks at tiny Waltham-based Proteon Therapeutics came to promote a less sexy goal—to prevent the vein that surgeons create in the arm of kidney patients on dialysis from clogging.
US Renal Data System marks 30 years of tracking kidney disease statistics
After nearly 15 years of a gradual drop in the mortality rate among patients on dialysis, there has been a leveling off, or lack of improvement, in reducing the death rate further. The organization that tracks both of those data points is the same—the U.S. Renal Data System.
Too many sugary drinks linked to higher kidney disease risk
New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says there’s a link between sugary drinks—both soda and sweetened fruit drinks—and the chance of developing chronic kidney disease (CKD).
Study: the kidney shortage kills more than 40,000 people a year
If there were enough kidneys for everyone in the US who needed one, we could save 43,000 lives every single year. That’s the conclusion of researchers Frank McCormick, Philip Held, and Glenn Chertow, in an editorial published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrologists.
CMS approves National Dialysis Accreditation Commission for ESRD clinic surveys
The National Dialysis Accreditation Commission LLC has received approval of deemed status from CMS, giving dialysis providers another option to complete the requirements of Medicare surveys to open and operate dialysis clinics.
Dialysis machine inventor Richard Drake, MD, dies
Richard F. Drake, MD, a partner in development of the Drake-Willock dialysis machine in the 1960s, died on Nov. 26, 2018. He was 85 years old.
Image from www.canstockphoto.com
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