Yesterday I had attended a luncheon with a lot of diabetes advocates, Certified Diabetes Educators, a few doctors and of course a couple of sales reps from various diabetic companies.  I won’t go into detail about all of the sales pitching, but I do want to share with all of you the great information I received from the “kidney guy.”  He was there to inform everybody that Diabetes had just surpassed Hypertension as the number one leader in kidney disease. He was discussing the importance of your glomerular filtration rates.  Yea I know, what the heck does that mean, so let’s just refer to them as your GFR.  Basically it is just a measure of how much creatinine is in your blood.  As it was explained to me, the poorer your kidneys the higher the creatinine which then lowers your GFR.  A healthy GFR should be above 60, if you are below 60 then you should definitely go see a kidney doctor.  I have never heard of this number before.  This number is becoming an even more important number for diabetics to know.  You should know your GFR just like you know your A1c and your blood pressure.  More on the A1c a little later.  Kidney disease is no joke, and it’s not painful.  Nobody knows they have it until it is too late and your on dialysis. Next time you go to get a script for your blood work, ask your doctor about it.  Tell them you just want to be tested to see where your number is.  If you are above 60, then you won’t get an exact number because you have nothing to worry about it.  If you’re getting blood work done anyway, why not just take a little more to find out if you are at risk. Now, let me get into the A1C discussion like I promised earlier.  Pretty much we can all start to so goodbye and farewell to that oh so important number.  The A1C will be slowly faded out over the rest of this year and the beginning of 2008.  It will now become called your “median blood sugar.”  It will also have a slightly different level of reading.  So your lucky number 7 or below that you have been targeting for so long will no longer be as important.  There will become a whole new scale you want to aim for. I also found it interesting that all of the CDE’s had expressed the same belief that they have never had a patient come in with an A1c of lower then 7 who did not experience multiple lows throughout the course of the day, which, because of this, could leave to gaining weight because of all the eating trying to fix a low. 

Please comment on any of this, I’d like to know if anybody out there knows about the GFR, or is it just me who is clueless.  Thanks.

Read more about Kidney disease and GFR here.