What is the Life Expectancy of IgA Nephropathy

IgA nephropathy will cause severe damages to the kidneys and affect patients' normal life. Due to lack of knowledge about IgA nephropathy, patients usually feel nervous and worried about their life expectancy once the diagnosis is confirmed by renal biopsy. While, negative emotions do nothing good to the patients and will affect the curative effects.

Actually it is hard to answer this question because the life expectancy of IgA nephropathy depends on patients' specific illness and physical conditions. From current statistical data, we can see that some IgA patients can receive remission and this accounts for about 4%-20%. The survival rate within 10 years is 80%-90% and there will be 20%-30% patients develop progressive renal insufficiency. IgA nephropathy is a chronic kidney disease and patients will only have slight symptoms and discomforts after 10 years and the illness condition will become life-threatening after 30 years. There are about 35% will develop end stage renal failure and the rest have persistent proteinuria or hematuria. Therefore early and proper treatments and preventions are very crucial.

The life expectancy and prognosis of IgA nephropathy are mainly affected by the following factors.

1. Pathology. Severe hyperplasia, glomerular sclerosis, crescents formation, capillary wall damage, interstitial fibrosis and vascular damages are indicators of poor prognosis.

2. Age and gender. For male patients and if age of onset is too old, the prognosis is poor.

3. Severity of hypertension. Hypertension especially refractory hypertension might cause sharp decline of kidney functions.

4. Severity of hematuria. Most scholars think that persistent microscopic hematuria with proteinuria indicates poor prognosis.

5. Treatments. Life expectancy has much to do with timely and effective treatments. Western therapy mainly adopts hormones which can only alleviate symptoms without reversing continuous deterioration of renal functions. Chinese therapy aim at the root problems and can have the following functions of inactivating myofibroblast, eliminating immune complexes, reducing and degrading extracellular matrix so as to recover part renal tissues and renal functions and delay progressing into end stage renal disease and taking dialysis.