Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

700 nephrologists to attend meet

Thiruvananthapuram: Over 700 nephrologists from across the country are congregating here for the 41 {+s} {+t} annual conference, ISNCON 2010, of the Indian Society of Nephrology from Thursday to Sunday.

The city is playing host to the conference, a prestigious affair attended by international experts, for the first time, Kasi Visweswaran, organising chairman, and Ramdas Pisharody, organising secretary and Principal and Head of the Nephrology Department at the Government Medical College, said here on Monday.

Ill-equipped

Given the increasing burden of diabetes and hypertension in the Indian population, chronic kidney diseases are highly prevalent, but the health system is ill-equipped to take care of them.

For every case of renal disease which reaches the hospital, hundreds of undiagnosed cases are there in the community, doctors say.

There are only 1,000 nephrologists in the country, most of them in tertiary-care centres.

“The symptoms of renal failure manifests externally only when the functioning of the kidney has gone down by about 85 per cent, when the patient has reached the end-stage renal disease and when the only answer for survival is a kidney transplant. There is an urgent need to create public awareness of the importance of early detection and treatment of renal diseases, given the fact that some 25-40 per cent of those with diabetes and hypertension develop chronic kidney disease,” Dr. Visweswaran said. New trends and strategies in the management of renal diseases will be discussed at the conference.

Richard Johnson from the U.K., Norbert Lameire from Belgium, Anupam Agarwal from the U.S and K.S. Chug, who is considered the father of nephrology in India, will join the discussions.

The conference will be inaugurated by Uthradom Tirunal Marthanda Varma, head of the ruling family of erstwhile Travancore, at the Rajiv Gandhi Convention Centre at Kovalam on Friday.

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