Ottawa doctors design online kidney disease risk calculator

Dr. Manish Sood, a kidney physician at The Ottawa Hospital, noticed a lot of his patients were surprised to find out they had chronic kidney disease. Many of them expected to present with some symptoms like back pain. 

“It's a silent condition,” Sood said on The Sam Laprade Show. “The reason people think this is because there's a lack of awareness of chronic kidney disease. Ninety-five per cent of patients with chronic kidney disease don't have back pain.”

Approximately one in ten Canadians live with chronic kidney disease, according to the Kidney Foundation, but many do not know they have it as it presents few symptoms until quite advanced.

That lack of awareness was a key motivator for Sood as he worked to develop an easy tool to help people learn a little more about kidney disease.

“We wanted to develop something where people can do it in the comfort of their home,” said Sood.

Sood and his team of researchers came up with a first-of-its-kind online assessment tool to calculate the risk of developing chronic kidney disease.

Far from typing a condition into Google and reading the most dire diagnoses and prognoses from WebMD, Sood said the risk calculator was studied and created by physicians and scientist specifically for public use.

The calculator asks a series of questions about lifestyle, past health concerns, chronic illnesses and the basics like age, sex and weight. After answering all the questions, which takes between three and five minutes, the calculator gives a percentage reflecting the risk of developing chronic kidney disease in the next eight years.

“These types of tools really empower [people] to understand what it means. It gives them a chance to learn about how to prevent it, and then they can go to their doctor and be informed,” said Sood.

Though it isn't recognized as being as dangerous as cancer or heart disease, chronic kidney disease puts patients at a much higher risk of heart disease. 

“There's a lot of interlinking going on, a lot of the same risk factors,” said Sood. “It's all about awareness and prevention.”

Listen to the full interview with Dr. Manish Sood on The Sam Laprade Show below.