by Saint Fang

Created on: October 05, 2009

When I was about eight years old, my mom was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease. Since then, I've been visiting the dialysis unit with her just about every chance I get. Kidney disease and dialysis have become a huge part of my life. I've decided this year not only to expand my knowledge of these subjects, but to also try to tell other people as well about kidney disease. I've found it's a subject that's widely either misunderstood or unknown. I find this surprising because 7.4million people in the United States have kidney disease. That's about 1 in 36. And 600,000 of those people have my mom's disease, Polycystic Kidney Disease. 0.26% of hospital episodes were for kidney disease and 84% of hospital consultations for kidney disease required hospital admission, 46% for men and 54% for women. (CureResearch.Com. 2007. 7 Sept. 2007 http://www.cureresearch.com). So, why do so few people know about or understand kidney disease? Well, I'm going to work to start changing that right now.

Let's start off with the basics, shall we? As I'm sure most people know, everyone has many different organs in their body that help keep them alive and healthy. Each organ has a job, such as absorbing nutrients, excreting certain fluids, or cleaning wastes from the body. One of these cleaning organs is the kidney. The kidney is a bean-shaped organ about the size of a fist. The kidney has numerous biological functions. Their primary function is to maintain the balance of bodily fluids by filtering and secreting metabolites and minerals from the blood and excreting them, along with water, as urine. Every day, a person's kidneys will sift through about 200 quarts of blood to remove about 2 quarts of waste products and extra water. (KidneysandUrologicalDiseases.com. NKUDIC. 2007. August 2007. <http://kidney.niddk.nih.gov/about/contact.htm>). These wastes are turned into urine, which flows to a person's bladder through tubes called ureters, and is then removed from the body. The filtering units of the kidney are called nephrons. There are approximately one million nephrons in each kidney. Anything referring to the kidneys in the medical world is referred to as 'renal'.

Normally, kidneys remove the BUN, which is a combination of waste products (nitrogen and urea) in the blood, which is normally excreted by the kidneys. However, sometimes things go wrong with the kidneys. First of all, the kidneys can develop congenital (present at birth) diseases. Some congenital diseases are

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