Dr Danielle Kirkman Details Future Questions for Research on Relationship Between Exercise, Kidney Disease

Future research should examine the effects of exercise on slowing the progression of kidney disease, among other important questions, according to Danielle Kirkman, PhD, assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Transcript

What are the future questions for research on the relationship between exercise and kidney disease?

I think we really need to get exercise integrated as part of routine care in CKD patients, and in order to do that, we really need to show that exercise affects hard outcome measures, so we need to show that exercise reduces mortality, that exercise reduces hospitalization rates. There’s a wealth of evidence out there that suggests that exercise improves quality of life, so certainly we shouldn’t wait to prescribe exercise until we have this data, because it does have a lot of beneficial effects on quality of life.

I think important areas moving forward as well are looking at the effects of exercise on slowing the progression of kidney disease. So we know that exercise doesn’t really do any damage to the kidney, but we still don’t really know if exercise training can improve kidney function and slow the progression of the disease, so I think that’s an important area to follow up as well.