Clinical Assessment and Management of Chronic Kidney Disease Across Its Stages

Defining and staging chronic kidney disease (CKD) has been a major public health and clinical advance that has benefited patient care by primary care providers, as well as nephrologists and other specialists. Each stage of CKD confronts both the patient and provider with different problems and clinical issues, often predictable from the natural history of each CKD stage. Proper CKD management requires understanding the physical and biochemical abnormalities that one can expect to occur throughout the course of a person's kidney disease, which is usually progressive and irreversible. The classification and staging of CKD have advanced care and facilitated research. The major clinical manifestations of each CKD stage, and typical accompanying laboratory abnormalities, in addition to merely extent of change in glomerular filtration rate, dictate the stage-specific management of the CKD patient.