Milken Institute's Sarah Wells Kocsis Highlights Key Findings of Her Research on CKD

Sarah Wells Kocsis, MBA, director of the Center for Public Health at the Milken Institute, talks about the key findings of her recently authored report, “Chronic Kidney Disease: Finding a Path to Prevention, Earlier Detection, and Management.”

Transcript

What are the biggest takeaways of your research?

Chronic kidney disease [CKD] is a huge public health problem. It's intricately tied to health equity and social determinants of health. So tackling CKD is going to require a major shift in our mindset and the approach. Roughly 1 in 7 adults have chronic kidney disease, and 9 out of 10 of them don't even know that they have it, so we really need to listen to what the research is telling us. And what it's telling us is that we really need to focus right now on root causes, and these causes are structural, social, and health related. That's going to require practical, scalable, equitable solutions aimed at both detecting and managing the condition upstream at earlier stages and focusing on reducing the burden of this debilitating disease.