Type 2 Diabetes: Preventing Complications

Kidney Disease in the United States

• Approximately 20 million Americans have kidney disease. The number of people developing kidney failure has doubled each decade for the last two decades.¹
  
• In 2001, there were about 400,000 people who had kidney failure, which requires dialysis or a kidney transplant to stay alive. By 2010, an estimated 661,330 individuals will have kidney failure.¹
  
• The annual cost of treating patients with kidney failure in the United States is more than $20 billion.¹
  
• In 2000, about the same number of people died with kidney failure as with breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.²
  
• The most common causes of kidney failure are diabetes and high blood pressure.¹
  
• Early kidney disease has no symptoms, and can become kidney failure with little or no warning if left undetected. When patients are not tested and treated for kidney disease early, it is usually discovered right before the kidneys fail.
  
• Kidney failure can be effectively treated if detected early.³

1 U.S. Renal Data System. (2002). National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Bethesda, MD
2 SEER, 2003.
3 Hostetter, T. (2001). Prevention of end-state renal disease due to type 2 diabetes. New England Journal of Medicine, 345(12): 910-912.

Excerpted and Adapted from NIH Publication No. 04-5577, August 2004.