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More people getting kidney failure in Singapore

2024-03-16 00:00:00.0 海峡时报-新加坡原网页

SINGAPORE – The number of people getting kidney failure here has gone up by 40 per cent over the past decade, with significantly more men and Malays suffering from it.

Among patients starting dialysis in 2022, three in five were men, while proportionately, three times more Malays than Chinese suffered from kidney failure.

For every one million Malays, 459 required dialysis in 2022, compared with 150 per million for Chinese, and 183 for the Indian population.

Kidney failure, or fifth-stage chronic kidney disease (CKD5), happens when the kidneys lose their ability to function, resulting in the accumulation of waste products and fluid in the body.

Kidney disease is a major problem in Singapore.

Globally, one in 10 people suffer from CKD. In Singapore, it is higher. The National Population Health Survey 2022 found that 14 per cent of the population had CKD, up from 9 per cent two years earlier.

One in four people here – close to 900,000 people – will suffer from CKD by 2035, according to projections by experts from the National Healthcare Group and the National University of Singapore published in an article in the International Journal of Nephrology in 2018.

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The largest proportion, however, will have early stages of the disease, they said.

There are five stages of CKD. Stage 1 and 2, or CKD1 and CKD2, are considered mild, with the kidneys still working fairly normally. But over time, the kidneys will deteriorate, with the condition progressing to CKD5, or end-stage renal disease where the kidneys are close to not working or have failed altogether.

Singapore has the third-highest incidence of CKD5, after Taiwan and the United States, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2021, 2,155 people were diagnosed with kidney failure – or about six new cases every day – against 1,557 in 2012, according to the Singapore Renal Registry Annual Report 2022 released in January 2024. The number of new CKD5 patients in 2022 was not available, as the registry tracks patients for at least six months to ascertain kidney failure.

The number of patients starting dialysis went up by 50 per cent between 2012 and 2022. Now, there are four new dialysis patients a day.

The report said that in 2020, Singapore had the world’s highest percentage of kidney failure patients starting treatment whose disease was due to diabetes – at 67 per cent.

To cope with the rising numbers, the National Kidney Foundation (NKF), the biggest dialysis provider here, runs 41 dialysis centres to care for slightly more than half of the roughly 9,000 people who are on dialysis.

This includes one centre that was opened in Bukit Batok in January. Another centre will open in Sengkang in May, and three more centres will be added by 2025.