Kidney Insufficiency and Uremia

Does renal insufficiency mean uremia?

Some people are confused about this question. Those who’re newly diagnosed with renal insufficiency may be scared and wonder.

In the clinical, chronic kidney disease can be divided into four stages. The four stages are compensation stage of renal insufficiency, discompensation stage of renal insufficiency, early stage of renal failure and advanced stage of renal failure (uremia).

In the compensation stage of renal insufficiency, chronic kidney disease patients can not feel any symptoms, and their creatinine level, GFR are all in normal range because of the compensation ability of the kidney. As we know, one important function of kidney is filtration. When some renal glomeruli are damaged and fail to work, the other healthy renal glomeruli will do more work to replace them. So creatinine and other toxins such as blood urea nitrogen, urea acid can be cleaned out of the body. In this stage, chronic kidney disease patients even do not have to limit the food which they take in. They do not have to limit water and keep low salt for the discharge of water is also normal.

In the discompensation stage of renal insufficiency, other renal glomeruli which do more work will also be tired and fail to work for a long time. In this stage, level of serum creatinine, blood urea nitrogen and urea acid may increase a little and chronic kidney disease patients can have symptoms such as anemia, fatigue, decreased body weight, and can not concentrate, and so on. These are usually ignored. If suffering from loosing water, infection, bleeding and so on, obvious symptoms will appear soon.

The third stage is early stage of renal failure. In this stage, renal function declines seriously. Chronic kidney disease patients in this stage can easily feel fatigue, weakness. Besides, anemia will become more obvious. Urine at night will also increase. In addition, blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine also increase obviously. Acidosis can also be accompanied. So this stage can also be called azotemia stage.

The last stage is advanced stage of renal insufficiency(uremia). In this stage, chronic kidney disease patients have serious symptoms in clinic such as severe nausea, vomiting, little urine, edema, high blood pressure, serious anemia, itch in skin, and so on.