Can Polycystic Kidney Disease be Cured

Recently researches on pathogenesis of PKD (polycystic kidney disease) have achieved great progress and people have known more of this disease. Even though, there is still no cure for it at present and what can and should be done is to control the complication so as to slow down the illness progression and in the end stage to adopt dialysis and kidney transplant.

PKD patients have great individual differences and the course of the disease is closely related to the complications. If patients have many complications, the prognosis is poor and in some cases, the patients have no complications though they have renal insufficiency, the illness will have slow progression and the prognosis is better. Therefore it is a key point to determine the prognosis to have proper preventions and treatments of complications of PKD.

The younger the patients have clinical symptoms, the poorer the prognosis. And generally the average life expectancy after symptoms appear can be about 10 years and the average age of death is about 50 years old without renal replacement therapies---dialysis and kidney transplant. The main causes of death are renal failure, heart failure, intracranial hemorrhage, lung infections, etc.

Though PKD can not be cured, patients should not wait passively for the final doom, there are indeed many things that can be done to alleviate the symptoms, slow down the illness progression so as to improve patients’ life quality and extend life expectancy.

Hypertension is one of the common complications of PKD and it is one of the major factors to aggravate the renal functions. Strict control of blood pressure can slow down the decline rate of renal function and reduce the mortality. The ideal value of blood pressure is to maintain it at 130/80mmHg. Early stage hypertension should control salt intake (2-4g/d), maintain proper body weight and have proper exercises regularly. As for anti-hypertension medicines, ACEI and ARB are the first choice. if these medicines have no use on lowering blood pressure, patients can consider to remove the cysts or the kidneys, but the surgery is not very appropriate because in most cases the bilateral kidneys are affected and the kidneys are filled with numerous cysts varying from millimeters and centimeters. Herbal medicine is another choice for PKD patients and some herbs have very good effects on lowering and controlling high blood pressure and infections and can do a lot of benefits to PKD.