Should Black People Get Race Adjustments In Kidney Medicine?

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

As the U.S. continues to grapple with systemic racism, some in the medical community are questioning whether the diagnostic tools they use may be contributing to racial health disparities.

As NPR science correspondent Maria Godoy reports, that debate is playing out prominently in the world of kidney medicine — specifically, in the use of estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR. The diagnostic formula most commonly used to assess the health of patients with chronic kidney disease may be unintentionally contributing to poor outcomes — and reinforcing racist thinking.

Read Maria's piece here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:05.6	Maddie Sifai here with Maria Godoy, science correspondent.
0:08.9	Hi, Maria.
0:09.9	Hi, Maddie.
0:10.9	So we've talked a good bit about racial health disparities on shortwave.
0:14.9	And today, you've got a story for a set in the world of kidney medicine.
0:19.8	People in that field are questioning whether a diagnostic tool, super widely used to assess
0:25.0	a person's kidney health may actually disadvantage black patients.
0:29.0	Yeah, so this re-examination has been going on for years now, but it's really come to
0:33.6	a head recently.
0:34.6	It's being driven by medical students, and I want to introduce you to one of them.
0:39.0	Her name is Naomi and Kinsey.
0:40.8	I'm a third year MD-MPH student at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
0:47.6	Now, back in her first year of med school, she remembers one day sitting in a lecture
0:52.4	and the professor is talking about GFR or glomerular filtration rate.
0:57.2	Which is just how fast a person's kidney is filter blood.
1:00.7	Right.
1:01.7	And now, directly measuring it is pretty complicated.
1:03.8	So doctors regularly do an estimate of people's GFR.
1:07.5	It's also known as EGFR.
1:09.3	So generally speaking, higher EGFR equates to better kidney functioning and lower EGFR
1:16.0	equates to worse kidney functioning.
	...

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